Dead Wrong
Dead Wrong
Janice Kay Johnson
A chilling blast from the past…Six years ago prosecutor Will Patton's girlfriend stormed out on him. That night she was brutally raped and murdered. The violent act knocked Will's world out from under him, alienating him from his family, who Will believed were responsible. Wrapped up in his own guilt and anger, Will developed a powerful thirst for justice…and was determined that no criminal would ever walk free again.Now he's returned to his hometown, but he is greeted by a gruesome discovery–another body and an all-too-familiar calling card. And once again the victim is romantically linked with Will. In order to track down this serial killer, Will teams up with rookie detective Trina Giallombardo–only to realize that if he falls for her, she'll be next….
Will tried to remember how well Gilly and Amy knew each other
They hadn’t been friends—nothing like that, but Amy was part of the crowd he’d introduced Gilly to. They had looked a little bit alike. Both five-eight or nine, leggy, boyishly slim, naturally blond. Neither blue-eyed. Gillian had had pale, almost sea-green eyes, Amy… He couldn’t quite picture them. Brown? No, not brown. Flecks of yellow and green.
Dead. Because, like Gillian, she was tall and blond and willowy? But their killers weren’t the same man. Couldn’t be the same man. Mendoza was guilty, guilty, guilty. A scum who had no business hitting on Will’s girlfriend in the bar, becoming enraged because she’d rejected him, raping, murdering, taunting.
Had Amy been chosen precisely because she looked like Gillian? A copycat crime required a copycat victim. But who in hell would imitate something like this? Could Elk Springs really have spawned two monsters?
It made no sense. Gilly’s murder by a man who’d hot-wired cars and fenced stolen goods but never committed a violent crime. This one now, six years later. Why Amy? Why now? A stranger, killed like Gillian, would have been bad enough, but Amy! Less than a week after they met again, talked about old times, flirted a little.
He went cold. Was that why she’d been chosen? Because he’d flirted with her? Because she’d once meant something to him?
Dead Wrong
Janice Kay Johnson
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Dear Reader,
When Harlequin asked me to do a Signature Select Saga story, possibly linked to one of my previous Superromance trilogies, of course it was PATTON’S DAUGHTERS that leaped to mind. I have other favorites among my books, but for some reason the characters in this trilogy and in Jack Murray, Sheriff, which followed, are more real to me than any others I’ve created. The sisters had such distinct voices, self-images and self-doubts. Writing those books, I sometimes felt as if I was channeling their stories, not making them up! In the back of my mind, I’ve always meant to revisit them. And what an opportunity…
Now if only I hadn’t made Meg Patton’s son, Will, such a well-adjusted young man. Note to self: plan ahead. However, even well-adjusted people get a little skewed when tragedy rends the fabric of their lives. Especially when they’re left with a heavy load of guilt. Poor Will! Things have now gone very wrong since you last met him as a nice college student who was close to his mother and father.
I’d been contemplating a book about a serial killer for a while, too. So, here’s hoping you enjoy meeting the Pattons again, or for the first time, and that this particular serial killer keeps you awake a little too late tonight!
Best,
Janice
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
EPILOGUE
BONUS FEATURES
CHAPTER ONE
GETTING THERE five minutes quicker wouldn’t make any difference. They weren’t racing to the rescue. They were going to view a corpse. Nonetheless, Meg Patton drove fast, with fierce concentration. If Detective Giallombardo said anything, Meg didn’t hear.
This wouldn’t turn out to be anything like the other murder, she kept assuring herself. The detail the kid who called 911 had blurted out would be an aside, something dropped at the scene, not a deliberate choice of murder weapon and staging. She’d feel like an idiot for tearing out here when she was supposed to supervise detectives, not respond to calls. She had already seen the way heads swiveled when she’d stood abruptly and said, “I’ll take this one.”
She’d garnered more surprise when she’d glanced around, choosing young Giallombardo almost randomly. Eenie, meenie, minie, mo. “Are you tied up? Then come with me.” Everyone in the squad room had stared after them.
Butte Road ran yardstick straight for miles between rusting barbed wire fences holding back brown heaps of tumbleweed before terminating at a small volcanic cinder cone. The pavement turned to gravel not much beyond the Elk Springs city limits. Most of the year, their SUV would have raised a red cloud of cinder dust to trail them like a tail. Today, the hard-packed surface was frozen solid.
She drove this road every few weeks. Her sister Renee, the Elk Springs chief of police, lived out here on the Triple B Ranch with her husband, Daniel, and her two young children. Meg barely spared a glance for their gate when she tore by it. Renee would want to hear about the murder, even if it was outside her jurisdiction. Cops didn’t like brutal murders happening in their own backyards. Even if, in this case, that backyard was a whole heck of a lot of empty country.
One of a half dozen in the immediate vicinity of Elk Springs, this lava cone, no more than a couple hundred feet high, wasn’t even dignified with a name, as far as Meg knew. The county had once contemplated using its cinders for road construction, until Matt Barnard of the Triple B made a stink about having trucks roaring up and down his road all day long. After that, it was left in peace, except for Friday-night beer parties and fornicating teenagers.
A lone pickup truck sat in the turnaround at the end of the road. Two heads in it, real close together. Kids, cuddling against the horror they had suddenly understood walked their world.
Meg was careful to pull in right behind them, so as not to further damage any visible tire prints.
Uh-huh, her inner voice jeered. On frozen cinders.
She killed the engine and got out, slamming the door and then pausing for just a minute to take in the surroundings. The bitter cold stung her skin.
Funny how a dead body could give a familiar landscape a surreal look. The view out here was spectacular, with high country desert stretching to the horizon in one direction, brown and stark in winter. The jagged peaks of the Sisters sliced the sky to the west, while Juanita Butte seemed to float to the north like a perfect scoop of vanilla ice cream. A few thin patches of snow clung to the cinder cone and the red-brown soil between tumbleweeds. The sky was a cold, crystal blue, the stillness absolute.
Until Detective Giallombardo also slammed her door and crunched around the rear of the Explorer to join Meg.
In silence, the two women walked forward, both staring at the woman’s naked body sprawled low on the slope of the cinder cone. Head uphill, resting on the pillow of a patch of snow.
In life, she had been long-legged and shapely. In death, she was bluish-white against the rust-red cinders, with the dark stain of bruises discoloring her flesh. Even before they closed the distance, Meg could see that her left breast had been mangled. Torn by an animal after death, maybe, although Meg thought that unlikely.
But the detail that riveted her was the jockstrap. The elastic of the waistband sliced into the victim’s neck. The cup had been twisted to cover her face.
A message, or a gesture of contempt for the victim. Maybe for all women. Meg never had known. The man who had killed in exactly this way, who had left the body posed just as this one was posed, had insisted he was innocent. Was still protesting his innocence from the state penitentiary, where he was serving a life sentence.
Feeling sick, she said, “I’ll talk to the kids. You call for a crime scene crew. We need pictures.”
Giallombardo nodded and went back to the Explorer.
Meg knocked on the window of the pickup and then opened the driver side door.
“Chris Singer?”
The girl, a waif with a blotchy face and red, swollen eyes, nodded.
“And you are?” Meg asked the boy.
“Colin Glaser.” He was trying to sound manly. The squeak at the end undermined his effort. He gazed through the windshield toward the ghastly sight. “That woman… She’s, like, dead.”
“Yes, I’m afraid she is.” Meg heard the grimness in her own voice.
He shuddered.
Meg looked at both of them. “Can you tell me when you arrived? Did you get out of the pickup? Touch anything?”
In unison, their heads shook violently. “We never got out,” the boy said. “I wanted to get the hell—the heck out of here, but when I started to back up Chris said we should call 911. And wait until the cops got here. So we locked the doors and that’s what we did.”
“We were only here like a minute before we phoned,” the girl said.
They’d been cutting school, Meg learned, because they had been having a relationship crisis. Despite the boy’s comforting arm around the girl, Meg guessed the relationship was dead now. Chris had called her dad, who was on his way out here. He wasn’t going to be a happy man.
She thanked them for being responsible, then left them to wait for the girl’s father.
“Let’s take a closer look,” Meg said to Detective Giallombardo, who obediently followed her. Both slipped on the slope of red cinders as they scrambled the eight or ten feet up, then edged toward the body.
Unless bloodstains provided a trail—and they were going to be a bitch to spot on volcanic cinders this color—it was going to be impossible to tell where the UNSUB parked, whether he dragged or carried the body, etc. How much Luminol did it take to spot blood in a landscape this vast? Footprints and ruts didn’t last in loose cinders, which tended to rattle downslope to fill any hole even when there was still a foot in it. Meg knew, because she’d climbed up to the crater several times as a teenager.
She crouched beside the victim, Giallombardo standing right above her.
Legs splayed in a grotesquely inviting gesture of sexual come-on. The savage bite marks on the breast were made by human teeth, if Meg was any judge. Maybe they’d get lucky and at least get a decent bite impression to match up with a suspect later. Arms spread to each side. The victim had been allowed no dignity in death.
And then there was the jockstrap. To appearances, it had been used to strangle the woman. It looked brand-new. Bought for the purpose.
This wasn’t chance. The staging was identical to the murder six years ago that had cost Meg her son in every meaningful way, though he still dutifully arrived at her door for family holidays.
She didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until Giallombardo said, “Identical to what?”
Meg froze, her instinct to keep family history private until such time as there was no option. But when it came down to it, she’d been a cop too long to hide evidence.
“The crew’s coming,” she said, glad of an excuse to put off the moment of truth.
“And Dad,” the young female cop observed.
A red SUV was gaining fast on the official convoy. It fishtailed once but didn’t even slow. As a parent, Meg understood.
She and Giallombardo scrambled and slid their way back down to the foot of the lava cone. Crime scene techs bundled up as they climbed out of vehicles—as afternoon fell, the air became icier. Meg estimated the day hadn’t reached ten degrees Fahrenheit when the sun was at its height, and the temp had probably already dropped to six or eight degrees with sub-zero to come tonight. Her cheeks and nose were numb.
She directed the crew to get them started, some spreading out to search for evidence, the photographer beginning to snap pictures, the coroner waiting to get to the body. The girl’s dad erupted from his SUV almost before it skidded to a stop, and she flung herself right over her boyfriend into Daddy’s arms.
Meg introduced herself, explained the situation and asked if he’d drive both kids back to town. “We’ve got his pickup boxed in.” To the boy, she said, “Colin, can you get someone to bring you out here tomorrow after school to get your pickup?”
He nodded.
To his credit, the father squeezed the boy’s shoulder and said, “Come on, son. Your mom home from work yet?” He led the two away and was soon backing out.
Meg leaned against the fender of her black Explorer. The young cop who’d been promoted to detective all of a month ago waited with a patience Meg admired.
Trina Giallombardo had risen fast in the ranks. She was only twenty-six, twenty-seven. A local girl who had gone to Oregon State to college, then come home. As a cop, she was smart, steady, mature beyond her years and dedicated. When Meg had interviewed her for the promotion, she’d claimed to have always wanted to be a detective.
She wore her thick, shiny dark hair drawn tightly into a bun. Big brown eyes dominated an olive-complected face that gave an impression of stubbornness and intelligence rather than beauty.
Meg would have given anything to have Ben Shea, her longtime partner and brother-in-law, here instead. But Ben had broken his idiot leg—thank God not his neck—trying to keep up with Abby on the ski hill. His leg was still in traction.
But why did I have to bring a novice? Meg asked herself. Instinct? She didn’t have a clue.
Gaze on the crew, spread out like giant ants below their hill, she finally answered Giallombardo’s question. “Six years ago, we had a murder that looked just like this one.”
“Six years…” Giallombardo frowned. “I was away at college. Wait. Not Will’s girlfriend?”
“You know my son?”
“Only by sight.” Did red tinge her cheeks? Hard to tell, with both their faces damn near frostbitten. “I was two years behind him in school. But I saw him play basketball. And since he was president of the student body…”
Meg nodded. “His girlfriend was raped and murdered when she came home with him for spring break from college. She was strangled with a jockstrap, and the cup was pulled over her face. She was posed just like that.”
“Oh.” The young cop exhaled the single, soft word.
They stood in silence while she processed the implications. “Isn’t that your brother-in-law’s ranch up the road?”
The fact that this body had been dumped so close to her sister’s home was already bothering Meg. Their family had been targeted once before. Surely not again. Surely this had nothing to do with the Pattons. It was happenstance that the previous victim had been Will’s girlfriend. She’d gone to a bar on her own and left with the killer. She’d probably never even mentioned her boyfriend or the fight they’d just had.
Giallombardo interrupted her thoughts. “Did you catch the killer?”
Meg nodded. “He’s supposed to be serving life.”
They both glanced involuntarily toward the body.
“Paroled?”
“We’ll find out.”
The photographer signaled the coroner, and the two women joined him. Sanchez, an elected official, had run unopposed for as long as Meg had been with the Butte County Sheriff’s Department. Unlike some elected coroners or medical examiners, he was good.
“Don’t see any surprises,” he said after a minute. “Looks like strangulation. See how deep the elastic has cut into her throat?”
They saw.
“Time of death?”
He hemmed and hawed. This cold made it harder to tell. It was like putting a body in deep freeze. “You find any ID?”
“So far, we haven’t even found her panties.”
He nodded. “I’m thinking last night,” he finally concluded. “Maybe twelve hours ago. You might look for a young woman who waited bar, say, and didn’t make it home.”
“Okay.” Meg was trying to take notes. She hoped they were readable. Either she wore gloves, or her fingers went numb. She alternated.
“Let’s take a look at the face,” the coroner suggested. “Then roll her.”
Meg struggled to pull a latex glove onto her right hand, then reached out and tugged the jockstrap to one side.
The victim’s mouth was frozen open as if in a scream, the grotesquely swollen tongue protruding.
“Was he hiding her face?” Giallombardo whispered. “If anything would shock you…” Before Meg could comment, the young detective was already shaking her head. “No. He posed her. He didn’t kill her out here. She would have been scraped by cinders when she struggled. And if he, uh, penetrated her, he’d have had to expose his penis.”
The coroner actually hunched, as if the very idea of baring himself to the sub-freezing air was so hideous he couldn’t prevent a physical reaction.
“Plus he’d have had to kneel on the cinders… No.”
Meg agreed. “She was already dead when he carried her here. A man horrified by his crime flees. He doesn’t lay out the victim so carefully.”
“He has to be a local. To know to come out here.”
“That thought has occurred to me.” Meg nodded at the victim. “You’re local. Do you recognize her?”
Giallombardo swallowed. Meg watched as she focused on the face, made herself look past the distended tongue. To study glazed eyes that might have been hazel, the tiny mole on one high cheekbone…
“Oh, God,” she whispered.
“You do know her.”
Her breath rattled in her chest and she nodded dumbly.
“Who is she?”
Giallombardo swallowed again. Against nausea, Meg guessed. “Amy Owen. She might not be anymore. I mean, she might have gotten married. But in high school, that was her name.”
Disquiet struck again. “That sounds familiar.”
“I think…” The detective was taking quick, shallow breaths. “I think Will dated her.”
Air hissed from between Meg’s teeth.
“He brought girls out here. Sometimes.”
With quick alarm, she thought, Not Trina Giallombardo. Boy, would that complicate things. “How do you know?” she asked, aware she sounded harsh.
Her deputy didn’t want to meet her eyes. “Not because…” She closed her eyes, obviously struggling to regain her composure. When she spoke again, her voice was devoid of emotion. “I heard girls talk. That’s all.”
Meg’s eyes narrowed. Was there some history here of which she was unaware? Damn it, had the young Trina Giallombardo had a crush on Will? If so, should she be jettisoned from the case?
But they didn’t know that this had anything to do with Will.
Please God.
“I came out here when I was a teenager,” she heard herself say. She was distantly aware that the other two were gaping. “With Will’s father.”
After what she realized was an appalled silence, Giallombardo said, “Um…I suppose almost everyone in Elk Springs has.”
The coroner looked up at Meg with shrewd eyes. “You sure Mendoza is still locked up?”
“We should have been informed if he came up for parole.” Meg stared down at the body. “Let’s roll her.”
Between rigor mortis and freezing, the job wasn’t easy. Despite the cold, Giallombardo looked green by the time they were done.
The backside revealed lividity and more bruising, nothing else.
Meg raised her voice. “Let’s bag her. People, has anyone found anything?”
General shakes of the head. No tracks, no discarded clothing, no convenient cigarette butts that didn’t look as if they’d been left last summer. Truthfully, Meg hadn’t expected anything different. The unknown subject—or UNSUB, to cops—had driven out here with the dead woman likely in his trunk. Maybe at night, maybe this morning. He’d carried her a few feet up the slope of the lava cone, splayed her limbs, adjusted the jockstrap like a man adding a flourish to his signature and left.
How in hell had he known every detail? Had he seen the body? Could there have been two murderers? Had he stumbled on the body before the cops found it? Or, she thought with a jolt, was this killer a cop?
And, whoever he was, why had he waited six years to imitate the previous rape and murder?
“Lieutenant?”
She knew on one level that Sanchez was talking to her, but still she stared down at the body and asked herself the one question she’d been avoiding.
What if Ricky Mendoza’s protestations of innocence were real? What if he didn’t do it?
And what if the real killer had been shocked by what he’d done? What if he’d been able to suppress his sexual perversion for six years—until something triggered his rage?
Something, say, like the fact that Will Patton had just moved back to Elk Springs?
Common sense revolted. No! Damn it, they had Mendoza cold. She’d been sorry, because she liked the kid, but he had to have been the killer. She was letting a mother’s fear intrude, and if she couldn’t think with the cool logic of a cop instead, she’d be the one who had to step back from this investigation.
“Sorry,” she said, forcing herself to look up. “What’s your question?”
“HEARD ANYTHING LAST NIGHT? Or early this morning?” As withered as the winter sagebrush, the old woman stared suspiciously through the six-inch gap between door and frame. Either she was worried about keeping the heat in, or this intruder out.
“Yes, ma’am,” Trina said politely.
“We’re to bed by nine o’clock.”
Trina wouldn’t have minded being invited inside. She was freezing on the doorstep with the sun sinking fast. This was the fourth house she’d stopped at, and at only one had she been asked in and offered coffee. The few swallows she’d managed were a distant, tantalizing memory.
She strove for a conversational tone. “You must not get much traffic out on Butte Road at night.”
The old woman looked at her as if she were simple. “Saturday nights, it’s like living next to Highway 20. All those young hands that work the ranches, they come hootin’ and hollerin’ by, two, three in the morning. Lean on their horns, stereos blasting to shake the windows. They even race sometimes.” Her mouth thinned. “They turn onto our property, we get out the shotgun.”
Trina considered mentioning that the law did not entitle a property owner to shoot someone for turning into his driveway.
Instead, she surreptitiously wriggled her fingers inside her gloves to see if they still functioned and said, “Last night wasn’t Saturday.”
“Some of them get drunk other nights, too.”
Heaven send her patience.
“I’m sure they do.” She shook her head as if scandalized. The old biddy. “Was last night one of those nights? You hear anybody heading home late?”
“Might have.”
“Can you recall what time that was?”
Mrs. Bailey’s lips folded near out of sight, as if it pained her to give a straight answer. Finally she sniffed. “Two-thirty-five. On a Thursday night. Then the fool turned around and went back to town. Bars shouldn’t be open that late.”
Despite her surge of excitement, Trina pointed out, “Someone might have been giving a friend a ride home.”
Silence, followed by a grudging, “Might have been.”
“Are you certain you heard the same vehicle coming and going?”
“Course I am! Wouldn’t have said it if I hadn’t meant it.”
Maybe it was perversity that had her suggesting, “One pickup truck sounds an awful lot like another.”
The woman didn’t like explaining herself. After crimping her lips and thinking about it, she said, “This one sounded like my Rufus out there. Don’t bark often, but when he does, you best jump.”
“A deep, powerful engine.”
“Isn’t that what I said?”
Her own lips were going numb. “Did you notice when the truck came back?”
“Didn’t look at the clock.” She chewed it over. “Twenty minutes. Half hour.”
The timing was just right.
“Mrs. Bailey, do you think you’ve heard this particular engine before?”
“Can’t say.”
“Would you recognize it again?”
“Might.”
Trina gave her most winning smile, which considering she couldn’t feel most of her face might look more like a death mask. “You’ve been a great help, Mrs. Bailey. We may need to speak to you again. In the meantime, I appreciate your cooperation.”
With no “You’re welcome,” or even a “Mind you don’t slip on the steps,” the old lady slammed the door shut in Trina’s face. A dead bolt lock thudded home.
If she wasn’t so darn cold, Trina would have laughed. She hurried to the Explorer she was driving, started it and cranked up the heat. Intermittent shivers wracked her. But at least she’d learned something that might be useful, she thought with a small glow of triumph. Useful enough, maybe, that Lieutenant Patton would let her keep working the case.
She couldn’t believe her luck to have been singled out today, and by Lieutenant Patton, of all people. Trina had become a cop because she wanted to be just like Meg Patton and her two sisters, the one Elk Springs police chief, the other an arson investigator. From the time she was eleven or twelve she’d read about their exploits in the newspaper, and since Will went to the high school people had talked, too. Lieutenant Patton had been the county Youth Officer back when Trina was in high school, so she’d talked at assemblies or in Trina’s classes a couple of times a year. Trina thought she was amazing—beautiful and brave and smart. Everything Trina wanted to be.
In her interview for the promotion to detective Trina had almost blurted out something about how much she’d always admired the lieutenant. Thank goodness she’d been able to stop herself. Even if it was true, it would have sounded like the worst brown-nosing.
Now here she was, hardly a month later, partnered with her. Despite her shivers, Trina still marveled. Junior partner, of course. The lieutenant had gone back to the station to find out whether the killer from six years ago had somehow gotten out of prison and also to try to discover whether other jurisdictions had had murders with this same M.O. Lucky Trina had been assigned one patrol officer to help her canvass the houses along Butte Road.
But it had to be done, and she was pretty excited to have actually learned something. Maybe. Unless the deep-throated pickup or SUV had just been dropping some drunk ranch hand back at the Triple B or the Running Y. Except she’d stopped at the Triple B herself and no ranch hands had admitted to being out late last night. She’d find out from Officer Buttram whether the same was true at the Running Y. Those were the only two working ranches past the Bailey’s place.
An hour and a half later, she hadn’t learned a thing. Buttram and she agreed to meet back at the station.
There, he shook his head. His ruddy face glowed. “Bitch of a night.”
“I would have traded my right arm for a thermos of coffee.”
“With a dash of whiskey.” He took off his sheepskin-lined gloves. “Nobody heard nothing.”
“I found somebody who did. A Mrs. Bailey.”
Her sense of triumph dimmed at the sight of his face.
“There’s a nasty one.”
“She calls in complaints?”
“Once a month or so.” He shook his head. “Hates the neighbors, hates teenagers, doesn’t much like cows. You believe her, somebody is always being noisy or trespassing.”
Noisy? “I don’t remember a house near hers.”
“She has damn fine hearing.”
Trina quizzed him about who he’d talked to at the Running Y, then went to Lieutenant Patton’s office.
Through the glass inset, she saw the lieutenant lift her head at the sound of the knock. She waved Trina in.
“You look cold.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her superior scowled. “Quit ma’aming me.”
“Sir…”
“That isn’t any better. You make me feel old.”
“Lieutenant.”
“A slight improvement.” She sighed. “I suppose that was an exercise in futility?”
“Actually, I did get one report of unusual traffic.”
Brows rose. “Really?”
Trina repeated what Mrs. Bailey said. “I understand she’s something of a crank….”
“She?”
“Mrs. Bailey?”
“Not Luella Bailey! She’s a thorn in the side of anyone who has dealings with her. Daniel—my brother-in-law—counts his blessings daily that his place isn’t beside hers. Pete Hardesty of the Running Y gets hell every time a steer finds a fence break.”
Crushed and trying to hide it, Trina asked, “Does that mean she’s not reliable?”
“Hmm.” Meg Patton rubbed her chin as she thought. “Well, she’s not delusional. When she says a steer is eating her dahlias, by God there it is. Kids do drag race out on Butte Road. So…no. She might actually be a good witness. Most folks out there wouldn’t pay any mind to a passing vehicle. Luella, though, lives to find grievances.” Her gaze sharpened. “Tell me again what she said.”
Trina did.
“Twenty minutes to half an hour. That would be about right.”
Trina nodded at the phone. “Did you learn anything?”
“Ricky Mendoza is right where he should be. That lets him out. No sign of Amy’s Kia. I sent someone to check her apartment complex and the lots outside the brewhouses and restaurants that seem like the most obvious choices. Otherwise, I’ve put out calls. Any kind of match through VICAP will take time.” The federal database was a godsend to local law enforcement. Unfortunately, it had limitations; many small jurisdictions didn’t input crimes.
Trina nodded.
“I’ve already talked to Amy Owen’s parents. They still live here, only a few blocks from where I grew up in the old town.”
“She hadn’t married, then?”
“Married and divorced. The ex is next on my list.”
“He’s around?”
The lieutenant consulted her notes. “Doug Jennings. He’s a ski bum, according to the parents. Amy wanted to think about buying a house, starting a family. He wasn’t interested.”
“So the divorce wasn’t ugly?” From what she’d read, Trina was willing to bet this killer and Amy had been strangers, anyway, but you had to consider all possibilities.
“Not according to them. They say he’ll be broken up to hear about her murder. I went by his place and he wasn’t home.” Meg Patton rose. “What say we go talk to him now, then take a look at her apartment.”
“Am I going to stay on the case, then?” Trina asked, rising, too.
The lieutenant looked surprised. “I tagged you, didn’t I?”
This didn’t seem the moment to ask why. “Thank you, ma…um, Lieutenant.”
Exhilaration wiped out her weariness. Her mind buzzed. She’d want to read the file on the six-year-old murder. Look for details that were the same—and ones that were different. Talk to whoever found that body. The cops who worked the murder. If this one was as similar as Lieutenant Patton claimed, this killer had to be close in some way to the previous crime. Copycats had a motive. What was this one’s?
Wow, she thought, feeling giddy. I’m a detective. A real detective.
Not even missing the cup of coffee she hadn’t yet poured, she followed Lieutenant Patton out.
CHAPTER TWO
WILL’S RESOLVE to move home to Elk Springs wavered from time to time. Pretty well daily, in fact. Tonight was a definite plunge in the Mood-O-Meter.
He was staying at his father’s while he looked for a place to live. Their relationship was pleasant but cool, thanks to Will’s long-held belief that his parents in their professional capacities were responsible for the scum who’d killed Gillian being out on the street and therefore free to rape and mutilate. If they’d done their jobs…
But they hadn’t, for reasons he understood intellectually if not emotionally. Now, six years later, he also understood that his anger had mostly been misplaced. But things once said couldn’t be taken back, and much as he regretted the fact, Will knew he couldn’t have back what he’d lost that night.
This week, his father was away at a conference for sheriffs and police chiefs. With him gone, Will was able to relax a little. He got along well with Beth, his dad’s wife, and with her kids.
Stephanie was a senior in high school this year, a really smart girl who had applied to private colleges like Whitman and even Vassar back east. Pretty, with her mother’s dark hair and blue eyes, she was the same serious kid she’d been when her mother married Jack Murray, Sheriff of Butte County.
Redheaded Lauren, fourteen, was in contrast currently grounded because she’d been caught cutting classes. She was a cheerleader and, according to her mother, a social butterfly who was a teenager with a capital T. Will could see what she meant. Lauren was all giggles and glow one minute, sulky the next. He sympathized, since he remembered his own teenage angst when his mom and he moved to Elk Springs so he could finally get to know his father. One minute, he’d believed he could clear Juanita Butte in a single bound, and the next he’d been sure his mother was trying to ruin his life.
So far, both girls seemed pleased to have their stepbrother around.
He’d been okay earlier, watching a TV movie with Steph and explaining to her why the whole trial scene was crap. Lauren had wandered in once, curled her lip, said, “That looks boring,” and gone off to instant message with the friends she was banned from seeing out of school until next Wednesday. “An eternity,” she’d moaned at dinner, after Beth had declined to release her from purgatory.
But after the movie, when Steph disappeared to her room and Beth went to the den to work on orders for her stationery business, Will sat in the empty living room and thought, What am I doing? I must be nuts.
The room, the house, got to him. He’d helped his dad strip these floors and the woodwork and then stain and refinish them. They’d both learned as they went, repairing plaster walls, painting, plumbing, even rewiring. Maybe because he’d been without a father for the first fourteen years of his life, Will had been more eager to spend time with his than most of his buddies were. Now this big old Queen Anne style house made him edgy. Aware of times past, of lost trust and easy affection.
The house was part of his history with Gillian, too. She’d spent weekends and school breaks here with him. They’d had incredible talks right here in the living room, made passionate love upstairs in his bedroom. They’d had that last fight in his bedroom, too, one that had been quiet but intense until she’d walked out on him. He’d run after her and, not caring who heard, stood on the porch and yelled, “Go! I don’t give a shit!”
But he’d given a shit when the cops were on his dad’s doorstep the next morning to inform him that his girlfriend had been found raped and strangled in Deschutes Park. He’d given a shit when they politely and inexorably questioned his whereabouts during the night even as his gut roiled with disbelief and horror and guilt, because he’d let Gilly stalk out without trying to stop her.
From where he sat right now, in a leather club chair, he could see the entry. Empty, but for ghosts. A rangy, carefree version of himself with Dad, scraping thick layers of varnish from the stair banister. He and Gilly, tiptoeing in after going out with some of his high school friends, stifling giggles, pausing to make out just inside the front door, two or three times on the staircase, barely getting the bedroom door shut before shedding their clothes. A slightly older Gillian screaming, “We’re done! Over!” before she flung open the front door to leave. Two officers wearing the familiar Butte County Sheriff’s Department green, saying, “I’m sorry to inform you…”
He groaned and laid his head back, his eyes closed. He didn’t even know why he felt compelled to leave cosmopolitan Portland for this small town that held so many complex memories. He loved Elk Springs, but he hated it, too.
Even for himself, the best explanation he could come up with for accepting the job in the Butte County prosecutor’s office was that he needed answers. Closure. Understanding.
He had an uneasy relationship with both his parents, although Gilly and his accusations had gone un-mentioned on all sides for five years or more. Mad because he’d hurt his mom, his aunt Abby hardly spoke to him, he didn’t know his own half-brother and -sister the way he should, and the stories about his grandfather Patton had begun to seem apocryphal. Had he been anywhere near as bad as they said? Even if he was, did that justify both Meg Patton and Jack Murray being so soft on a troubled young kid that they let him slide out of taking responsibility for one crime after another?
And Gilly… Why hadn’t she just driven back to Salem? Why did she have to go to a bar? Was she getting in her car with the intention of returning here, maybe to say, “I’m sorry,” when a hand closed over her mouth from behind? Had she thought Will might still come after her? Somehow save her?
Still caught in that hazy nexus of past and present, he wondered with a dull ache why he hadn’t gone after her. Her parents grieved to this day. They claimed not to blame him, but they must.
He blamed himself.
The doorbell rang, and he jerked, his eyes opening. Who in hell at this time of night?
Eyes wide with instinctive alarm, Beth emerged from the home office at the back of the house, but Will, who had reached the front hall before her, said, “Let me find out who it is.”
Through the peephole he saw the dark green of sheriff’s department uniforms. His sense of disorientation returned. Gillian?
But when he opened the door, it was his mother he found on the porch, along with another officer. A young woman who appeared vaguely familiar.
“Mom?”
Her face looked drawn, her eyes tired. “Will, I need to talk to you.”
He backed up. Cold air rushed in with them. Or maybe the chill was inside him.
“Hi, Beth.” Mom tried to smile.
“Meg.” Beth pressed a hand to her breast. “Is everything all right? It’s not Jack?”
“No, no. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. No, everybody in the family is fine.”
But somebody, Will diagnosed, wasn’t fine. Somebody Will knew, or she wouldn’t be here.
The wife of a cop, Beth knew, too. She looked Will’s mother over with an experienced eye. “Can I get you coffee? Better yet, a bite to eat? I’ll bet you haven’t stopped, have you?”
“I’m fine…” Meg stopped. She gave a faint laugh. “Actually, I’m starved. A snack would be great, if it isn’t too much trouble.”
“Don’t be silly.” Beth shooed them towards the living room. “Coming right up.”
His mother pulled off her gloves, then began to shrug out of her coat. He took it and the other cop’s, too, and hung them on the tree near the front door.
He took a few steps into the living room, then stopped. “What’s up?”
“Detective Giallombardo, this is my son Will. Will, Trina Giallombardo. You may remember her from school.”
“You look familiar,” he admitted.
“I was a couple of years behind you.”
That would explain it. By his junior and senior years, he and his friends hadn’t been interested in lower classmen. Maybe a really hot girl. This Trina hadn’t been that. So he’d probably passed her in the hall without ever really focusing on her face.
“Detective Giallombardo,” he acknowledged, then faced his mother. “Tell me.”
“A girl you dated in high school was found murdered today.”
A sound escaped him. A profanity, maybe. He reached out and gripped the back of the leather chair.
“Who?”
“Amy Owen.”
He’d expected… He didn’t know who he’d expected. But not Amy.
“We only went out three or four times.”
“That’s what Detective Giallombardo thought.”
This woman he didn’t know, who had been two years behind him in school, was suddenly an expert on his life?
“You’re well-informed.”
Her returning gaze was expressionless. “You were the big guy in school. People talked.”
His irritation vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “Amy. My God.”
“Sit,” his mother ordered.
“Here’s coffee,” Beth said behind him.
He sank into the chair, soul-sick. On the job, he dealt in murder often, but not the murder of people he knew. Only with Gillian had he experienced firsthand the horror and grief family and friends felt.
Amy Owen, pretty, not smart but sweet.
“I saw her last week,” he said.
“What?” Hand outstretched for a cup of coffee she hadn’t yet picked up from the tray, his mother turned.
“I saw her.” Jeez, he wished he hadn’t. He wished Amy Owen was no more than a hazy memory. “She was at J.R.’s when I went there with Gavin and Travis.” No surprise—the sports bar was a favorite hangout for locals. “She was with Jody Cox. Remember her? And a friend of hers, a newcomer.”
“Another woman?”
He saw what she was getting at. “Yeah, a woman. Karin. Don’t remember the last name. I have her phone number if you want it.”
Will saw a fleeting expression of…something cross Trina Giallombardo’s face. Another time he might have wondered at it. Right now, he was too wrapped up in the image of Amy jumping from the bar stool to wave at him.
“Will! Will! Over here. Wow! Hi!”
He guessed he’d flirted with her a little bit, because she’d been flirting with him, but it was her friend’s phone number he’d quietly asked for before the women announced they were calling it a night.
His mother sat on the couch facing him. “Did she tell you she’s divorced?”
“Yeah. Actually, her ex came in, too. Didn’t look real happy to see her with a bunch of guys.”
“Did he say anything?”
Will shook his head. “That’s just my impression. He came over and she introduced him. He was polite.”
“Was he with anyone?”
“Not that I saw.” His mother was interrogating him, he realized. She’d even flipped her notebook open. The coffee and toasted sandwiches Beth had made sat untouched on the table.
Her gaze was sharp on him. He could see her brain humming. “Did he stay around?”
“Uh…I don’t really know.” He frowned. “Wait. I did see him a little later. Maybe half an hour.” Appalled, he said, “You don’t think…”
“We don’t think anything yet. No, he’s unlikely. This didn’t look like a crime of passion. Someone who’d loved her, however angry he was, would have felt remorse, regret. Treated her body with more respect.”
“Was it a bad one?” Will asked quietly.
His mother looked older than she had since—damn, since he’d aged her with his accusations and wild rage.
“Yeah. Will…”
He wasn’t going to like what was coming. Aware of both women watching him, he braced himself and waited.
“We have a copycat. Will, this looked like Gillian’s murder.”
He lurched to his feet. “What do you mean?”
She rose, too. “I mean it could have been the same killer. The body was left in the same condition.”
An image of Gilly’s body flashed before his eyes. Through gritted teeth, he asked, “Was she raped?”
His mother’s expression was compassionate. “Yes.”
In some part of his mind, he noted that Trina Giallombardo’s dark eyes were only watchful. If she felt pity, suspicion, dislike, sympathy, she didn’t show it.
“Strangled with a jockstrap?”
“Yes.”
He wheeled away to stand with his back to the women. He was panting as if he’d sprinted the last half mile of his daily run. Sweating. Sick. Gilly, oh Gilly. The women’s faces overlay like a double exposure, both blond and fine-boned. Not Gilly, he thought. Not this time. Instead, some sick son of a bitch had raped and tortured pretty, sweet Amy Owen, then left her body as if she were a whore. Garbage.
“Who?” he asked, voice guttural.
His mother sounded grim. “We’ll find out.”
“Was she in the same place?”
“No.” Gillian’s body had been left right in town, among the willow trees in the town park on the bank of the Deschutes River. “Amy was left at the lava cone past the Triple B. A couple of kids found her.”
He turned to face them all of them, Beth in the background. “Why are you here?”
His mother’s expression changed. “What?”
“Is my name going to come up?”
She gaped. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
“Yeah? Why not? I’d be a logical suspect, wouldn’t I?”
Her mouth opened and closed like a fish’s. He was glad to have disconcerted her for once, put her on the defensive.
Detective Giallombardo said, “Your mother didn’t want you to read about it in the morning paper. She thought the news would be better coming from her.”
Shame flooded him, as she’d intended. Will swore and scraped a hand over his face.
“I’m sorry, Mom. God. I’m sorry.”
His mother gave a twisted smile. “It’s okay. Of course you’re upset.”
He saw in her eyes that he’d hurt her. As, he realized, he’d intended. And he didn’t even know why he’d lashed out.
“Mendoza…” He hated the taste of the bastard’s name in his mouth.
“Is still at Salem.” The Oregon State Penitentiary was in Salem, Oregon’s capital.
“A friend of his…”
“That’s a possibility we’ll pursue.”
“But not a very good one.”
She didn’t have to answer. Of course, it was unlikely one of Ricardo Mendoza’s friends would commit a crime this savage, and why? What was the motive?
For the first time, Will was thinking like the attorney and prosecutor he was.
“What’s the point? What’s this scum trying to say?”
“I have no idea,” his mother admitted. “Maybe nothing. Maybe this guy just liked the idea. Thought wiping out her identity, metaphorically, by replacing it with a crude symbol of masculinity was funny.”
“Like he’s saying, ‘In your face’?” Will asked.
She spread her hands. “Maybe he thought a jockstrap sounded like a handy murder weapon. Hard to trace, wouldn’t hold fingerprints well, and, hey, you could carry it around in your pocket without exciting suspicion. You’re on your way to the gym. What’s the big deal?”
“Have you ever before or since read or heard of a woman strangled with a jockstrap?” he asked.
“No,” she conceded.
“Here we are. Small town. Not all that many murders, and ninety-nine percent of those are your garden-variety shoot-the-abusive-husband type. Biker brawls. Not the work of serial killers.”
They’d speculated back then that Gillian’s murder was too “sophisticated” to be a killer’s first. The savagery coupled with the care taken displaying the body, had seemed to be the work of someone who’d done this before. On the other hand, Mendoza had also done unbelievably stupid things: he was seen leaving the bar with Gilly, his skin was beneath her fingernails and his semen was found in her body. Evidence of grandiosity and disorganized thinking, everyone said. He’d felt invincible, never thought he’d be suspected. So what if he’d talked to Gillian in the bar? She’d talked to other men, too. Maybe he hadn’t realized anyone at the bar could name him. It didn’t matter—he’d been convicted on DNA.
“So what are the odds that, just coincidentally, we have a second killer with the same idea?”
She didn’t have to answer.
“Are you going to talk to Mendoza?”
“Maybe. We’ll concentrate on her movements yesterday first.”
“She told me where she worked.” But, damn, he couldn’t remember.
“She was a hairstylist. She had a chair at Mountain High Salon.”
Beth made a sound. They all turned.
“Was she tall and blond? With a mole on her cheek?” She looked from one of them to another. Pressed her hands to her cheeks. “Oh, no! She cut my hair the last time. And Steph’s been going to her. I should have recognized the name! I hate to tell Steph. Oh, that poor girl.”
“I’m sorry,” his mother said, uselessly.
“Does Jack know yet?”
“No. He hasn’t called, and I figured there’s nothing he could do, not tonight. I’ll page him in the morning.”
Will’s mother and Detective Giallombardo ate then, both gobbling as if they couldn’t remember their last meal. He knew from experience that his mother would be lucky to snatch a few hours of sleep tonight. She’d spend tomorrow talking to everyone who’d know anything about Amy’s last day. Meg Patton was dedicated. Just…sometimes soft, in his opinion. Wanting to do the opposite of whatever her bastard of a father would have done. She and Aunt Renee both had seemed to spend their careers trying to bury their father’s legacy as Elk Springs police chief.
The two women left, Will’s mom promising to keep him informed. Then, he and Beth rehashed what they knew, Beth clearly upset.
“That poor, poor girl,” she kept saying. “She was your age?”
“A year younger.”
“Twenty-eight, then. Only twenty-eight.”
He finally persuaded her to go to bed, in part by heading for his own. With the house quiet and dark, only his bedside lamp on, Will sat up against a heap of pillows and tried to read, but kept finishing the same page without remembering a word.
He was tired, but at the same time wide awake. Antsy. Feeling as if he should do something. Fight or flight. Will recognized that he was in shock, reliving the hours after Gilly’s body was found, when a thousand, if onlys and I should haves had run crazily through his mind as if he were on crack. Replay, replay. Change the ending. He’d kept trying, over and over, until he was crazy and slammed his fist into the wall. He hadn’t even noticed he’d broken bones for a while, the pain nothing, nothing, compared to the agony in his chest.
His book fell to the bedcovers, forgotten. He couldn’t shut out the memories, the horror.
Amy, face alight when she saw him, waving in delight. “Will! Over here!” Gilly laughing up at him, staring at him with hate that in his imaginings became terror. Her face, Amy’s face, one and the same.
Pulling himself back from the abyss, Will tried to remember how well Gilly and Amy knew each other. They hadn’t become friends—nothing like that, but Amy was certainly part of the crowd he’d introduced Gilly to. They had looked a little bit alike. Both five-eight or -nine, leggy, boyishly slim, naturally blond. Neither blue-eyed. Gillian had had pale, almost sea-green eyes, Amy… He couldn’t quite picture them. Brown? He flashed on Trina Giallombardo’s brown eyes, assessing, accusing, judging, because he’d lost it with his mother. Angry at her intrusion, he shook his head and returned doggedly to his struggle to see Amy Owen. No. Not brown. Flecks of yellow and green.
Dead. Because, like Gillian, she was tall and blond and willowy? But their killers weren’t the same man. Couldn’t be the same man. Mendoza was guilty, guilty, guilty. Scum who had no business hitting on Will’s girlfriend in the bar, becoming enraged because she’d rejected him, raping, murdering, taunting.
Had Amy been chosen precisely because she looked like Gillian? A copycat crime required a copycat victim. But who in hell would imitate something like this? Could Elk Springs really have spawned two monsters? Copycat monsters?
It made no sense. None of it made sense. Gilly’s murder by a man who’d hot-wired cars and fenced stolen goods but never committed a violent crime. This one now, six years later. Why six years? Why now?
Why two women Will had known? A stranger, killed exactly like Gillian, would have been bad enough, but Amy! Less than a week after they met again, talked about old times, flirted a little.
He went cold. Was that why she’d been chosen? Because he knew her? Because he’d flirted with her? Because, like Gilly, she’d once meant something to him?
But that made no sense either. He’d dated her a few times. Kissed her. Had sex with her once—after they’d both had too much to drink at a party. So what? He’d dated and kissed a dozen girls or more in high school. Slept with several. Had a couple of girlfriends who lasted months. One nearly a year. He knew Nita and Christine both were still around. Why not one of them? Why Amy? Opportunity? Just because in a small town there were only so many look-alike blondes?
Why? God, why? he begged, even as he knew he’d get no answer.
CHAPTER THREE
LIEUTENANT PATTON HAD somehow kept word of the murder out of the morning papers, but they all knew it would be on the five o’clock local news.
The downside was that Trina had to be the one to tell many of Amy Owen’s friends and co-workers about her death. The task was made worse by the fact that Amy was apparently liked by everyone. No secret delight, no affected shock.
This particular friend, a plump, freckled redhead, turned milk-pale. “Dead?”
Seeing her sway, Trina said, “Please. Sit down.”
“Murdered?”
Gently taking her upper arm, Trina backed her up to the couch and pushed. Marcie Whittaker never took her stunned gaze from Trina’s face.
“How can she be?”
How did you answer that kind of question? It implied that there was a rational order, a why for every action, a series of logical consequences. It suggested that if you took to heart all of your parents’ warnings, you’d be safe, loved, prosperous. Trina had been a cop long enough to know that things didn’t work that way.
She and Lieutenant Patton had divided up names. Amy had had dozens of friends. After talking with the crew at the beauty salon, they’d each taken a list and started contacting anyone who might have spoken with Amy in the days leading up to her death, or who might have been with her yesterday. Since her vehicle had not yet been located, finding out where she might have gone that night was critical.
Trina remembered Marcie from high school. She and Amy had been part of a pack of popular girls—cheerleaders, homecoming princesses, stars of the spring musicals. As remote from Trina’s world as Will Patton had been. They’d walked down the hall in groups of three or four, laughing and tossing their long, shining hair, their clothes always perfect, their complexions glowing from a weekend on the ski hill. Money was never a problem for any of the popular kids, Trina had believed then.
In the intervening years, Marcie had put on weight. She’d gotten married right out of high school and had two school-age children as well as a toddler. Trina had expected a fancy house and found her instead in a modest rambler on a street of mostly rentals. Marcie had invited her in with surprise and said, “My youngest is down for a nap. You want to talk about Amy? Why?”
Now, in answer to the unanswerable, Trina said, “Amy may just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s what we’re trying to determine.”
“Was she…”
“Raped?”
Marcie bit her lip and nodded.
“Yes, I’m afraid so.” They’d decided to admit that much.
“Oh God, oh God.”
“Did you speak to Amy in the last couple of weeks?”
Tears oozed from Marcie’s eyes. She nodded. “Excuse me. I need to—” She leapt to her feet and bolted from the room.
Trina used the time to study the framed photos on the mantel. Most were presumably of Marcie’s children, redheads all like their mother. Trina recognized the man who appeared in many only because Marcie had taken the last name Whittaker. In high school, Dirk Whittaker had been one of the swaggering jocks, a state All-Star tackle. Like a lot of brawny guys, he’d put on serious weight in the ten years since he’d graduated.
What interested her most was that, displayed with the family photos, there were three framed snapshots, probably taken at several year intervals, of Marcie with her old crowd, including Amy Owen. In the first, all were recognizably the same people they’d been in high school—still slim, stylish, confident. By the next photo chronologically, although all were posing jauntily and laughing, some of the crowd had changed: begun to put on weight, quit expending so much effort on their appearances. Perhaps half were still sleek and beautiful. By the most recent photograph, the distinction was obvious. Some, like Amy, still looked beautiful, privileged and entitled, while others in the crowd showed the toll taken by jobs that didn’t allow for hours at the gym, by scrimping financially, by the exhaustion of raising children.
Will Patton was in the middle photo. A young woman Trina didn’t recognize stood within the circle of his arm. She bore a superficial resemblance to Amy: she was also tall, although dwarfed by his height, and her hair was the silvery shade of ash-blond that had to be natural. Amy was prettier in a conventional way; the woman with him had a distinct bump on the bridge of her nose, ears that poked out a little, and a catlike slant to her eyes that gave her the look of an elf. Maybe not beautiful, hers was still the kind of face you didn’t forget.
Trina suspected that the fine-boned, moonlight-pale girl gazing up at Will Patton rather than at the camera was Gillian Pappas, the victim of the original murder. Her gaze lingering on the couple, Trina felt an odd squeezing in her chest she wanted to believe was pity but she knew was more complex.
“Those are my kids,” Marcie said dully from behind her.
“What a cute little girl,” Trina felt obligated to say.
Marcie came to stand beside her. “Amy is in some of these.” She picked up the most recent, framed in silver. “Right there.”
No Will in this photo. Trina wondered if he’d quit coming home, quit hanging out with his old friends. No, not entirely, because he’d been at J.R.’s with a couple of them.
“You stayed close friends, then.”
Although Marcie had given no indication of recognizing Trina, she seemed to assume that everyone knew she and Marcie were best friends. “Well, naturally. We didn’t spend as much time together, of course. I mean, I’m married and have kids. But we talked a couple of times a week and had lunch every week or two. She didn’t mind if I brought Vicki. Amy wanted kids.” Hit by the knowledge that Amy would never have a baby, Marcie began to cry again. Silently, with bewilderment.
Trina opened her notebook. “Had she mentioned anyone following her, some guy making her nervous? Anything like that?”
“No, I’m sure she didn’t.”
“Was she seeing a man?”
“She went out. But not with anyone special. She got divorced just last spring, you know.”
“Are you aware of her dating in the past few weeks?”
Marcie named a couple of men. “Plus she was hoping this guy we knew in high school would call her. Will Patton.”
Trina’s fingers tightened on her pencil. “Had he called, to your knowledge?”
Marcie shook her head, eyes wet. “Amy would have been on the phone instantly if he had. She had this huge crush on him. I mean, she always did. She said she saw him last week, that he’s moved back to Elk Springs.”
“Was there anyone who might have felt jealous if he could tell how she felt about Mr. Patton?”
“Felt jealous? Oh. Like, did she blow some guy off so she could concentrate on Will?” Marcie shook her head again. “Like I said, she’d see men, but it was casual. The only one who might be jealous was her ex, but he had his chance.”
Interested in her spiteful tone, Trina asked about the victim’s relationship with her ex-husband.
“I think he wanted her back. But he still didn’t intend to really settle down. You know? He’s this big outdoors guy. He wants to ski all winter and mountain climb all summer. He works up at Juanita Butte in the winter, but he never even looked for a job in the summer. He got mad when she had to work. Plus, she didn’t like to climb.”
“Her parents described the breakup as amiable.”
“It was.” Marcie shrugged. “But he kept coming around. She slipped a couple of times and had sex with him, which was dumb.”
“Did she have other sexual relationships?”
“You mean, did she screw guys? Sure.” Marcie sounded surprised, as if a single woman being sexually active was a given.
No, there was more to her tone, Trina suspected; she was just a little envious. Married almost ten years, with three kids, she probably lived vicariously through Amy’s tales.
“Anyone in particular?”
“Um…” Marcie thought. “Adrian Benson. She told me the other day he wasn’t that good in bed, even though he’s hot.”
Benson was one of the men she’d said earlier that Marcie might have dated in the previous week or two. Trina starred his name. He wasn’t anyone she recalled from high school.
“If she met a man over drinks and liked him, would she be likely to leave with him?”
“Yeah, why not?” The moment the words were out, Marcie’s mouth formed an O. Amy Owen had very likely paid an extreme penalty for trusting a dangerous man.
Trina steered her gently back to the final day. Yes, she’d talked briefly to Amy midafternoon. “I told her I’d try to get a babysitter Saturday night so Dirk and I could go out.”
Trina already knew that Amy had worked yesterday, leaving the salon about four. “Did she mention plans for yesterday evening?”
“She said she was bored and might go get a drink. She didn’t say where or if she was going with a friend.”
Trina wrote down Amy’s favorite hangouts and then thanked Marcie. Handing her a card, she said, “Please call if you think of anything at all that you think we should know.”
The next friend of Amy’s on Trina’s list actually recognized her.
Bronwen Fessler had started a clothing boutique in town that Trina had heard was very successful. Daddy Fessler was a banker and had had plenty of money to bankroll her.
The clothes in the window were bold and bright-colored. Stuff that shouldn’t have gone together somehow did, like a hot-pink cashmere turtleneck and lime-green wool slacks. Maybe, Trina decided, studying the display carefully, the skinny loomed scarf worn as a belt accomplished the magic. Personally, she might have bought all three pieces and never in a million years considered putting them together.
Which, she guessed, was why she was a cop and not a fashion designer or owner of a boutique. And why everything she wore was boring.
She pushed open the door, making the bell that hung above it tinkle. Bronwen Fessler hadn’t changed much, just become more stylish. A petite brunette with short, artfully tousled hair, she sat on a high stool behind a glass case that held jewelry and on top of which was the cash register. She appeared to be attaching labels to chunky bracelets laid out on the glass top in front of her. Through the window Trina hadn’t noticed the two women browsing sweaters displayed in cubes on the back wall.
Bronwen glanced up with a practiced smile that she aborted. “Officer…” she began in surprise, then, “Wait. I know you, don’t I? From school. No, don’t tell me. Something like Teresa.”
“Trina. Trina Giallombardo.”
“Right.” She seemed pleased by her memory rather than by Trina’s appearance. “You’re a police officer, huh?”
“A detective.” Being able to say that still gave Trina a thrill. “I’m here to speak to you about a friend of yours.”
“A friend of mine?”
“Um, excuse me,” one of the women interrupted. “I’d like to try this on.”
“Certainly,” Bronwen told her. To Trina, she asked, “Can you wait a minute?”
“No problem.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she watched as Bronwen Fessler charmed and flattered the two customers, who looked about forty but were probably older. There was nothing like being loaded to help a woman keep her looks. These two had perfectly dyed and coiffed hair, suspiciously smooth faces, skillfully applied makeup and carefully tended figures. In the end, one bought two sweaters and the other a necklace, all for prices that made Trina gape.
Staring after them, she exclaimed, “Did she just pay almost seven hundred dollars for two sweaters?”
“And they were on sale. Sweetie, people do, you know.”
Not people in Trina’s circles.
“Wow,” she said, then flushed.
“I take it you dress from J.C. Penney?” Bronwen said with amused disdain.
“More like Eddie Bauer.”
“Jeans and flannel shirts?” Her practiced eye swept from Trina’s well-polished but sturdy black shoes to her unpierced ears. “Come in sometime when you’re off-duty and I may convert you. For old times’ sake, I’ll allow you an employee discount. The first time you come.”
Old times’ sake? Trina doubted they’d ever exchanged a word. She thought they might have been in a class or two together; she’d been advanced enough in math to often be in classes with students a year or two ahead of her.
Glancing at a mannequin dressed in a beaded bustier and a pouffy black skirt, she was tempted, though. Maybe the right clothes could accomplish magic. She could probably afford them if she wanted them….
Yeah. Sure they would. And why do you want to be transformed? she mocked herself. So that you catch Will Patton’s eyes?
Uh-huh. That was going to happen. Like he ever dated a woman who wore bigger than a size four and wasn’t blond.
“Thank you for the offer,” she said formally. “But I’m here in my official capacity today.”
“Right. I forgot. You wanted to ask me about a friend.” Her tone became flip. “Do I know someone who’s held up the bank?”
“I understand you’ve remained friends with Amy Owen.”
“Well, sure.” She laughed. “Amy’s not the bank robber type.”
“I regret to tell you that she’s dead. She was murdered last night.”
Bronwen stared at her with a complete lack of comprehension. “She can’t be dead. I saw her last night. We had a drink.” She reached for the telephone. “I’ll call her. There must be a mistake.”
Trina shook her head. “Her parents have identified her.”
“If they were upset…”
Voice gentle, she said, “I saw her body. I recognized her.”
“But…” She seemed to deflate, her vivacity gone, her face five years older. “Did somebody break in, or…”
“We don’t know yet. We haven’t found her car. That’s why we’re talking to her friends.” Trina opened her notebook, hoping if she kept Bronwen talking to avert tears. “Had you made plans in advance to get together?”
Bronwen took a deep breath and straightened. “She called at about…oh, I don’t know, six o’clock? I had some bookkeeping to do, but Amy said she was bored and pleaded with me. I met her at the Timberline. She wasn’t hungry, but I had chicken wings and we both had a drink.”
“Did she have something she urgently wanted to tell you?”
Bronwen shook her head. “We just chatted. She seemed restless. She was bummed because this guy hasn’t called her.”
“Will Patton?”
“How did you know? Oh. I get it. You’ve already talked to other people. Yeah, Will. Otherwise, I talked about what I’m buying for spring for the store and she bitched about her ex because he won’t leave her alone. She thinks…” Bronwen’s voice stumbled. “She thought her parents were sympathetic to him, which annoyed her.”
“What was he doing to annoy her?”
“Not what you’re thinking! Doug is an okay guy. He’s just been regretting the divorce. He wouldn’t get violent.” She said it as if the idea was absurd, unthinkable.
“But somebody did.”
Bronwen’s fingers twisted together. “God. How was she killed?”
“We’ll know more after the autopsy. It appears she was strangled.”
“Was she raped?”
“Yes.”
“Doug wouldn’t have raped her,” she said with certainty. “She admitted to me that she let him spend the night not that long ago. He didn’t have to rape her.”
“Rape is only peripherally about sex. It has more to do with control and power.”
She kept shaking her head. “Not Doug.”
Trina didn’t really believe that the ex-husband would prove to be a serious suspect. This murder didn’t have the hallmarks of domestic violence. But it was also possible that they were dealing with a killer who had strangled Amy in a fit of rage, then remembered the murder from six years ago and decided to imitate it to throw the police off. An impulse killer who was also able to keep his cool. Not common, but conceivable.
“Is Doug a friend of yours, too?” Trina asked.
“Mine? Heavens, no! Like I said, he’s a nice guy. But honestly, he’s not that bright. Just kind of big and dumb and fun-loving. Not my type.”
No, Doug sounded like a lousy prospect to have kept his cool and used his head.
Trina determined that Bronwen and Amy had parted in the parking lot at just after eight.
“Do you think she might have gone back in?”
“No, we were parked next to each other and she pulled out of the lot right behind me. I had to get some work done, and I assumed she was going home even though she still seemed…I don’t know.” She visibly groped for a word and settled for the same one she’d used earlier. “Restless. Maybe a little unhappy. Not in the mood to go home and watch reruns and sip cocoa.”
She suggested other brewhouses and pubs where they might show Amy’s picture, other friends Amy might have called.
“Guys? Wow. Adrian Benson. Maybe. She was getting bored with him. I mean, they didn’t have that much of a thing, and she was losing interest, but just for something to do… Um, Travis Booth. They were sorta friends, sorta something more.”
“Travis.” Wasn’t he one of the friends Will Patton had mentioned being with the evening he ran into Amy at J.R.’s? “I remember him. He was a friend of Will Patton’s.”
“Right. Only he didn’t do high school sports because he ski-raced. He actually made the U.S. ski team, but then he was hurt really badly training for the downhill.”
“Yeah, yeah, I remember.” Like most guys that age, Will had run in a pack. His buddies were jocks, but the smart ones. Most had gone on to college after they graduated. “I didn’t realize he was still in Elk Springs.”
“He’s head of the ski school at Juanita Butte. But he’s getting some success as an artist, too. Don’t you read your newspaper? They did a feature on him—I don’t know—a month or so ago.” Her voice changed, relaxed fractionally as she reminisced. “He used to draw really wicked caricatures. He did this fantastic one of Mr. Jones, only one of the teachers snagged it when it was being passed around, and he ended up in detention for a week.”
Mr. Jones, then high school principal and not a popular one, had been ripe for caricature with his double chins and beady eyes.
Trina forced herself back to more relevant subjects. Travis Booth, for one. He’d seen Amy fall anew for Will Patton, maybe resented it. Trina starred his name, too.
She flipped back through her notes. “Do you know a Gavin, who seems to be a friend of Travis’s?”
Bronwen pursed her lips. “Gavin. You mean Huseby? He kind of hung around Will. I never paid any attention to him. I know he’s around again.”
Bronwen supplied a few new names of people in Amy’s circle. At the end, she asked, “Do you think this guy killed Amy in particular? Or was she just…”
“Convenient?”
“That sounds awful, but…” She fidgeted. “Yeah. I mean, should single women be scared?”
“At this point, we simply don’t know the motive. It wouldn’t hurt to use extra caution.”
“Okay.” Bronwen gave a wry smile. “Thanks, Trina. Wow. Business is slow, anyway. Maybe I’ll close. Or maybe not.” She shivered. “I don’t want to go home alone. I could call around. Some of us could get together and have a kind of wake.”
“That might help all of you.” Trina nodded. “I appreciate your assistance.”
She was at the door when Bronwen called, “Trina? That employee discount? I meant it, you know. Come back someday.”
“I just might.” Trina nodded and left, the bell tinkling as she let the door shut behind her.
She started her Explorer to get the heat cranking, but didn’t pull away from the curb immediately. Instead, she thought about Amy Owen as her friends described her.
On the surface, a party girl. An easy victim, because she’d bar-hopped, lowered her guard by drinking and been sexually promiscuous enough to end her evening with any man who appealed. Yet, it was clear from what her parents, Marcie and Bronwen had said that Amy wanted something different. That she was filling time until she found the white-picket-fence ending she craved. As much as she liked to party, she also possessed a quality of sweetness that drew people. She had a huge circle of friends. Trina had two best friends, a couple more casual ones and a few other people who might invite her to Christmas gatherings. She thought she was more the norm than Amy Owen.
An amazing number of those friendships dated from high school. In fact, it seemed every conversation today had twisted back to the halls of Elk Springs High School. Maybe that was natural in a small town. But given that they’d all graduated ten years ago, wouldn’t you think the group would include more newcomers, and that more of the high school crowd would have left town? The jocks were still the only desirable guys for the popular girls, who still clustered to flip their shiny hair and giggle at jokes no one else would get.
Not fair. Trina grimaced. They had lives. She was the one directing the conversations, asking them to dredge up memories.
Anyway, who was she to talk? She could have gone anywhere, but had chosen to come home to Elk Springs even though her childhood wasn’t what you’d call happy. And didn’t she still nurse a little bit of a crush on Will Patton, Homecoming King?
Besides—chances were none of this had anything whatsoever to do with Amy Owen’s murder. She’d likely been chosen at random, because she was available: sitting alone at a table in a pub or walking out to her car in a dark parking lot by herself. The odds, Trina thought, finally switching on her turn signal, were against Amy having been raped and murdered by a friend or even acquaintance.
BETH HAD GONE TO WORK, the girls to school. Will had intended to hunt for an apartment today. He wanted to buy, but was finding little for sale at this time of year. Absentee owners could rent by the week at astronomical rates. Spring, when the out-of-towners melted away with the snow, was when houses appeared on the market, according to the real estate agent who was helping him look.
The guy had called that morning. His income was probably zip at this time of year, and he was trying like hell to find something Will would buy.
When Will had walked into the real estate office last week, he’d been startled to recognize Jimmy McCartin from high school. The guy had been a hanger-on to Will’s group, too little and scrawny to play sports, but around all the time because he was manager for the football and baseball teams. Will hadn’t liked to crush the guy, but he never seemed to notice when he wasn’t welcome.
Heck, maybe that made him the salesman of the century. Successful real estate agents had to be damn pushy.
Jimmy was still scrawny and still able to make Will uncomfortable by doing things like slinging an arm around his shoulder when he introduced him to people and implying that they’d been best friends in high school.
“Hey,” he said. “Did you hear about Amy? I saw Travis this morning. He told me.”
Will had been hoping the caller was his mother with news.
After he and Jimmy hashed over the news for a couple of minutes, with Will pretending he didn’t know any more than anyone else did, McCartin asked, “Did you think any more about that house at Crescent Ridge? If you buy now, you could pick your own tile, paint colors, maybe upgrade some fixtures.”
The new development he was talking about was maybe half a mile from Will’s mother’s place, just off the mountain loop highway on the way up to Juanita Butte. The handful of houses that had been framed in so far were going to be beauties. Different builders were working there, which avoided the cookie-cutter effect, too. There was a shingled one at the top of the ridge that Will had liked.
“It’s just too big,” he said. “What was it, thirty-five hundred square feet? I don’t have any use for a place that size.”
“You could think about buying a lot and getting one custom built,” McCartin suggested.
“Yeah, but then I’d be looking at next fall before I had a place to live.” He got cream out of the refrigerator and poured some into his coffee, cell phone to his ear. “I don’t know. I’ll keep the house in mind, Jimmy, but I’m thinking I’ll wait a couple of months before I commit.”
“You know I’ll call you the minute I see any new listings,” McCartin assured him. “Hey, you planning to go to J.R.’s this weekend?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Will said, because he didn’t want to be rude.
“Great! I’ll see you there, then.”
Will shook his head as he hit End.
He hadn’t slept much last night, so at noon he was on his third cup of coffee and still trying to summon some motivation to get going. When the phone rang, he snatched it up.
“Pattons’ residence.”
“Will?” His father’s deep voice was unmistakable. “I just talked to Meg.”
“Are you coming home early?”
“I’m giving the keynote address at the banquet tomorrow night. I can’t. Besides, what can I do that your mother can’t?” Still, the growl in his voice betrayed his frustration. This was his county, his command. He wanted to be there, not exchanging tips of the trade with other law enforcement personnel in Seattle.
He wasn’t coming home early. Then what was this phone call about? Will waited.
“You know we’re going to have to consider the possibility that Mendoza was wrongly convicted.”
“Bullshit!” Will exploded. “You had DNA! How much more solid can you get?”
“We had proof he’d had intercourse with Gillian,” Jack Murray corrected. “In the absence of semen or hairs from another man, it was enough. But he’s been saying since the day we picked him up that he had sex with her, and that was all.”
“Bullshit!” Will said again. Intensely agitated, he paced the kitchen, wheeling each time he reached a wall. “Gilly wouldn’t have gone out and screwed some stranger! You knew her better than that.”
“What I know is that she was mad as hell. People do stupid things when they’re drunk, and her blood alcohol level was sky-high.” His voice softened. “She might have done it to punish you.”
The raging pain tore into Will’s gut, as it so often did. He stopped in his pacing and bent over as if he’d struck across the belly with a two-by-four.
Whatever Gilly had or hadn’t intended, he had been punished a thousand times over. But he couldn’t, wouldn’t, believe that Gilly would have been that careless with herself. That cruel to him.
“No,” he said. “No. He did it. He raped her and killed her.”
“Will…”
“Copycat crimes happen. We both know they do. What if he talked some buddy into it so he could walk?”
“Goddamn it, Will, you know we’ll consider every possibility. One of those possibilities is that we convicted the wrong man.”
“You’re back to defending him, aren’t you? Still can’t believe you could have been wrong about him? That he was using you?”
“That’s low.”
“Is it?” The phone creaked, he gripped it so hard. “Funny how fast you came to the conclusion that this murder clears Mendoza.”
“I didn’t say that—”
“The hell you didn’t.” He pushed End and slammed the phone onto the counter. Planting both hands there, he bent his head, teeth gritted. Fury and shame and renewed grief swelled in his chest until it hurt.
After a minute, breathing hard, he straightened. He’d been looking for motivation. Guess what. He’d just found it.
He grabbed his parka from the coat tree, checked to be sure he had his car keys, and left the house. If he had to rent a place that stank of cat urine, he’d do it.
Anything, to be out of here by the time his father got home on Sunday.
CHAPTER FOUR
TRINA AND Meg Patton, having failed to catch Doug Jennings at home, drove up to the Juanita Butte ski area on Saturday.
The lieutenant parked in the employee lot, taking a spot right by the slope of packed snow leading up to the lodge. Since her husband was the ski area general manager, she had reason to feel at home here.
Unlike Trina, who stepped out of the Explorer gingerly.
Despite frostbite-inducing cold, the lift lines were long, the slopes busy enough that skiers and boarders must be having to dodge each other. Never having learned to ski, Trina felt out of place here, which made her sulky and reminded her of her teenage resentment of the popular kids. But how could she help it? In contrast to all the tanned, long-legged, bleached-blond athletes heading for the lifts, she was pasty-skinned, dark-haired and compact.
She trailed ten feet behind Lieutenant Patton by the time they reached the A-frame that was, according to the lieutenant, the nerve center of the ski area. Ducking to save her skull from a snowboard carelessly swung by a teenage boy calling to friends above in the lift line, she slipped, knocked into a passing skier who yelled at her and finally righted herself at the foot of the snow-packed stairs leading up into the hut.
Naturally, the information center was staffed by a tanned, Nordic blond beauty.
“Oh, yeah! Doug’s wife! That was such a bummer. I mean, he’s going around with this tragic face.” She sounded awed at his suffering. More practically, she added, “His shift should be ending in a minute, anyway. I can call him down here.”
She got on the radio and his crackling voice agreed that he would rendezvous with the police officers at the ski school hut.
Stamping her feet and shivering, Trina thought about what Lieutenant Patton’s husband had said about Doug Jennings. Enthusiastic, great with the public, no apparent ambitions beyond the next ski season.
“Of course, Scott doesn’t know him well,” she’d added. “Unless the guy had been a major problem, a lift operator is a pretty small cog in Scott’s operation.”
Now, Lieutenant Patton also had the Nordic goddess call the ski school and ask for Travis Booth, Will’s friend who now headed the ski school. “If he could come down in, say, half an hour?”
Yet another crackling voice agreed.
Recognizable from photos in her apartment, Amy Owen’s ex-husband slid to a stop right by the door, as beautiful and Nordic as the goddess inside. Tapping the bindings with the tip of one of his poles, he stepped off the skis and set them inside.
His eyes were actually brown, despite the sun-bleached blond hair. Brown and puppy-dog-like and mournful. “You’re here about Amy?”
“Yes.” Lieutenant Patton nodded toward the lodge. “Can we go inside and talk?”
“Oh. Sure. I guess you’re cold?”
Despite heavy parkas and gloves, the lieutenant and Trina weren’t dressed for sub-zero weather. In just minutes, Trina had lost awareness of her face as a part of her body. When any of them talked, their breath froze in plumes that hung in the air. Trina wanted to say, Gee, you think?
Inside the busy lodge, they stamped snow from their boots. Meg Patton led the way upstairs to what appeared to be offices. A secretary smiled and said, “Scott said to give you the small conference room. Can I bring you coffee?”
“Please,” the lieutenant said.
If she’d turned it down, Trina would have whimpered. She was shivering and trying to hide it. Damn, she thought. Why hadn’t she taken a job somewhere warmer? She didn’t even like snow. The LAPD must have openings on a regular basis. Or maybe San Diego.
In the conference room, Doug Jennings dropped his gloves on the table, stripped off his snow-white hat with the cute pompom and peeled off his form-fitting parka. Very reluctantly, Trina divested herself of her outer layers. Gratefully seizing a mug of the coffee the secretary brought, she sat next to the lieutenant and opened her notebook.
Lieutenant Patton asked, “Mr. Jennings, when did you last see your ex-wife?”
His face crumpled, as if he were about to cry. “Wow. I can’t believe she’s dead. Amy was…” He swallowed. “Um. When did I see her the last time. Maybe Monday?” He pondered. “Yeah. Monday. I ran into her at Safeway. Kind of on purpose. See, I know she shops there, and she usually goes after work. So that’s when I shop.”
“But you are divorced.”
“Yeah, but…” He took a huge breath and let it out in a rush, his beseeching gaze moving from Lieutenant Patton’s to Trina’s and back. “I didn’t want to be! I love Amy! I shouldn’t have let her go.”
“And how did Ms. Owen feel about your pursuit?”
Expression ingenuous, he said, “I think she was coming around.” As if reading doubt on their faces, he added, “Really! We’ve actually kind of gotten together a couple of times lately. You know.”
They knew.
“Had you asked her to marry you again?”
“She said no, but not like she was mad or wanted me to leave her alone. More like…” He frowned. “Like she was teasing. I figured it was just a matter of time.”
“And the issues that led to the divorce in the first place?”
“I told her we could have a baby if she wanted. Kids are okay.”
Trina barely refrained from rolling her eyes at his magnanimity.
Lieutenant Patton’s voice changed. “Mr. Jennings, I have to ask where you were from Wednesday evening until Thursday morning.”
“Where I was?” He gaped at her, and Trina realized he really was naive enough not to have realized why he was being questioned in the first place. Bronwen was right; he was dumb. “You don’t think I…” Wildly searching their faces, he saw that they did indeed think the possibility existed that he had murdered his ex-wife. “I loved Amy!”
“Mr. Jennings, we’re obligated to rule out an ex-husband. If we can verify your whereabouts…”
He relaxed. “Oh, sure. Um…” More deep thinking. “I was here. I worked late shift on Wednesday evening. After the lifts shut down at ten, some of us stopped at the Timberline for drinks.”
The same place Amy had been earlier in the evening.
“You didn’t see Amy there?” Trina asked.
Both the lieutenant and Doug looked startled to hear her speak.
“No. It must have been close to eleven by the time we got there. She gets up early for work. She wouldn’t have still been out…” His Adam’s apple bobbed.
Hastily, before the moistness in his eyes could develop into a deluge, the lieutenant asked, “How late did you stay?”
He seemed to focus with an effort. “I don’t know. Until about one? Then Steve and I went back to our place and crashed.”
“Steve?”
“My roommate? Steve Bacon? He works lifts, too.”
“I see.”
Trina could read her mind. Why the hell hadn’t anybody mentioned that Doug Jennings had a roommate?
“Is Mr. Bacon here at the ski area today?”
“Sure!” He started to surge to his feet, then checked himself and sank back in the chair. “I think he’s working Outback today.”
The lieutenant abruptly stood. “Just one moment.”
She slipped out, returning quickly. “All right, Mr. Jennings. A couple more questions. Was Ms. Owen dating other men?”
“Flirting sometimes. Maybe just to make me jealous.” Even he didn’t believe himself.
“Did she mention anyone making her nervous? Following her, bugging her for a date?”
“Nothing like that.” He shook his head and pleaded, “Why Amy? Everybody liked Amy.”
Voice gentle, Meg Patton said, “The chances are that she was chosen randomly, simply because she happened to be alone at the wrong moment.”
His face worked. He cleared his throat. “Are you, uh, done with me?”
“Yes. Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Jennings.”
Face still contorted, he nodded, shoved the chair back and blundered from the room.
The two officers sat in silence for a moment. “What did you think?” the lieutenant asked.
“My impression is, he’s sincere. Also not the sharpest knife in the drawer.”
“No kidding.” Lieutenant Patton let out a gusty sigh. “I’m liking the feel of this less and less.”
Trina knew what she meant. A murder committed by a spurned ex-husband was one thing; a brutal, sexually motivated murder by a stranger choosing a victim only because she was available and fit a vague “type” was another altogether.
After a moment, Trina asked, “Did you send for the roommate?”
Still brooding, the lieutenant nodded. “Let’s squeeze him in before we talk to Travis. We might as well accomplish as much as we can while we’re here.”
Steve Bacon arrived a minute later, dark-haired, at least, but otherwise fitting the mold: blue eyes sapphire-bright against that glowing tan skiers all seemed to have. Cold air and an aura of energy entered the conference room with him. His glance took in Trina, dismissed her in an all-too-familiar way and turned to Lieutenant Patton.
Irritated, Trina said too loudly, “We understand the area was open for night skiing on Wednesday.”
She felt the flick of the lieutenant’s gaze. Nonetheless, Meg Patton stayed quiet.
As if she were an idiot, Steve Bacon said, “Yeah, sure. It always is.”
“And did you work?”
“Yeah. I ran the Gold Coast lift.”
“Did you carpool up here that day?”
She must have sounded too bellicose.
He balked. “Is this about Amy’s murder? Why are you asking me questions?”
“Can you just answer the question, please.”
“I rode with Doug. Doug Jennings. We take turns when we’re working the same shift.”
“And you did that night.”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“What did you do after the lifts shut down?”
He told the same story Doug had. He was more certain about the time, because he’d glanced at the clock when they walked in their apartment. “We got home at 1:45. Then we sat around and bull-shitted for a while. I don’t know. Maybe an hour. Neither of us had to be at work until one.”
After letting him go, the lieutenant said, “So much for the ex-husband.”
“It didn’t look like a murder committed by an ex-husband.”
Meg rubbed the back of her neck. “No,” she said, voice weary. “No, it didn’t.” Her eyes were sharp when she looked at Trina. “You didn’t like him.”
Trina hunched her shoulders, a bad habit when she felt defensive, one she was trying to overcome. “No. I guess I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“He just seemed like a jerk.”
“In a way relevant to this case?”
“Uh…no.”
“Was coming on that strong justified, then?”
Trina looked back at her, face as expressionless as she could make it. “No, ma’am.”
Voice milder than Trina expected, the lieutenant said, “On the job, keep your personal feelings to yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Trina repeated woodenly.
“I didn’t like him, either. Ah.” Lieutenant Patton tilted her head. “Possibly Travis?”
Sure enough, Trish escorted in yet another handsome man with that unmistakable air of vitality and athleticism. He had changed from high school as much as Will Patton had. Adolescent cockiness had become masculine confidence. But something on his lean face hinted at pain and regret.
Both were obliterated by his grin. “Hey, Will’s mom.”
Smiling, the lieutenant stood. “Travis. It’s good to see you. Congratulations on the Frye Museum showing.”
“Thanks. It felt good. I guess I’m not just a local boy anymore.”
Frye Museum?
“We’d like to ask you some questions having to do with Amy Owen’s murder,” the lieutenant continued. “I understand you’d stayed closer friends with her than Will had.”
“Sure, no problem. Hey, Trish,” he called over his shoulder. “Can I get a cup of that coffee?”
He dragged out a chair and turned it so that he was straddling it, arms crossed on the back. He studied Trina. “I know you, don’t I?”
“I was two years behind you in school. Trina Giallombardo.”
He nodded. “Nice to meet you, Trina Giallombardo. Again, if we ever actually met before.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay, then.” He smiled thanks at Trish when she brought his coffee. Turning back to the police officers, he said, “As for Amy… I don’t know about friends. She was more part of the group. We didn’t have much in common.”
Trina asked, “Did you ever go out with her?”
“Yeah, a couple of times. After she and Doug said bye-bye. But we didn’t have much to talk about, and it didn’t go anywhere. I doubt she was hurt when I didn’t call again.”
“Then the decision not to continue dating was yours rather than hers?”
“I really do think it was mutual. Amy was a sweetheart, but not much of a reader, no interest in art, didn’t like to ski because she got cold…” He shrugged. “In turn, I have no interest in the latest movie opening at the cineplex, fashion, what everybody we knew back to grade school is doing nowadays… We ran out of things to talk about. She looked as restless as I felt.”
“Surely you knew this when you asked her out.”
“You’d think, wouldn’t you? But when conversation is general in big groups you don’t always remember who contributes what. She was fun, pretty, had a nice laugh. So on impulse I asked if she wanted to have dinner. This was…I don’t know. Maybe six weeks ago. The next weekend we had drinks and she came to a gallery opening with me. Afterward she wanted us to join Marcie and Dirk Whittaker at Sister’s, that new brew-house. I made an excuse and left her there. End of romance.”
The lieutenant asked, “Did you sleep with her, Travis?”
His eyebrows rose. “Does it matter?”
“We’re gaining the impression that she tended to end her evenings in someone or other’s beds. I guess I’m asking if that was true.”
Expression conflicted, he appeared to be thinking furiously. “Okay,” he said at last. “After our first date, she came home with me. Are you asking me to rate her performance?”
Lieutenant Patton gave a crooked smile. “No. What I’m trying to determine is whether she would readily have agreed to leave a bar with someone Wednesday night.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Yeah. I think maybe she would. My take is, Amy liked sex. Or maybe what she liked was having a guy. She always seemed to be looking.”
The lieutenant nodded. “Thank you for your honesty.”
Forehead still creased, he asked, “Why would anyone want to kill Amy? She liked sex, sure. But to the best of my knowledge, she never hurt anyone.”
“Knowingly.”
He shrugged in concession. “Let me put it like this. I think she went out of her way not to hurt anyone.”
Face drawn, Lieutenant Patton said, “Travis, I want you to think back. Way back. Do you know of anyone who has harbored a grudge against Will? Anyone who is still around town?”
He straightened, gripped the back of his chair. His gaze locked with Meg Patton’s. “Will? What does…” He uttered a guttural obscenity. “Amy wasn’t murdered like Gilly, was she?”
“There were…similarities.”
He swore again. “You told Will?”
She nodded.
“How’s he taking it?”
“I don’t know,” the lieutenant said in a voice Trina had never heard from her. “As I’m sure you’re aware, he doesn’t open up to me much.”
“Why didn’t that idiot call me?” He shoved himself to his feet, hesitated, then sat back down. “No. God. I can’t think of anyone who hated Will like that. Everybody liked him.” He shook his head as if he were trying to clear it. “Mendoza was convicted. I called damn near every night during the trial! Will told me about the evidence!”
“Ricky always said there was another explanation. That he left her alive.” The pencil in the lieutenant’s hand snapped. She didn’t seem to notice. Her voice had become raw. “What if he did?”
“God.” Travis scrubbed his hand over his face. “Is Will still at his dad’s? He hasn’t found a place?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll talk to him tonight.” He stood then, and squeezed Lieutenant Patton’s shoulder. “Hey, Will’s mom. You’re super cop. You’ll find out who did this.”
Her smile hurt to look at. “Thanks, Travis. You’re a good kid.”
His laugh wasn’t any more real than her smile. “When I want to shed a few years, I just come see you.”
She watched as he left the room, then met Trina’s eyes. “I’ve known him since he was fourteen.”
“Wasn’t he around during the trial?”
“No, he was in Europe training for the World Cup tour. He had an exciting life in those days. Val d’Isere, Innsbruck, St. Moritz…Will would get postcards. Travis won the opening downhill of the season that year, at Chamonix. I remember how excited Will was.” She fell silent for a moment. “Gillian was killed that spring. Travis was in Japan that week. By the time the trial started, he was back in Europe training for the next winter.”
That’s why she’d felt comfortable telling him as much as she had, Trina realized. He might be the only friend of Will’s his mother could trust.
The lieutenant’s gaze sharpened. “Trina, I’m going to have you go see Mendoza in Salem. You have a fresh eye.”
Trina kept her mixed excitement and trepidation out of her voice. “Do I tell him about this murder?”
“Why not? But first, learn what you can about his friends, cousins, nephews. Anyone who might care enough to think of a sick way to get him off.”
“Or who wants to be just like Ricky,” Trina said slowly.
“You got it. But beyond that, I want you to get him to tell his story about what happened the night Gillian Pappas was murdered. Just…listen.”
Trina nodded. “Is there anything you want to tell me about him?”
There was a history here she didn’t know.
But Lieutenant Patton shook her head. “Meet him, hear his story. I don’t want to predispose you in any way.”
“I have been reading police reports and the transcript of the trial.”
“But talking to him in person, that’s different.” She got to her feet. “I’ll call over to Salem, we’ll set it up for tomorrow.”
“If he’ll agree to talk to me.”
She snorted. “Oh, he’ll agree. Ricky Mendoza never misses a chance to tell someone he’s innocent.”
THE APARTMENT WAS DECENT, the rent exorbitant. That was the price you paid for being in a hurry.
Will unpacked his suitcases and made the bed. After signing the lease that afternoon, he’d visited the storage unit where most of his worldly possessions were stowed and managed to find boxes labeled Bedding and Kitchen. He hoped like hell his coffeemaker was in one of them.
When the doorbell rang, he abandoned the box of towels on the floor in front of the incredibly tiny linen closet and went to let Travis in. His friend glanced around the blandly furnished living room, wincing at the watercolor print of Juanita Butte that hung above the distressed leather couch and peeled pine end tables.
“You know, you could have stayed with me.”
“It’s looking like I won’t be able to buy until spring. You don’t need a roommate for months.”
“If I’m not on the ski hill, I’m in the studio. You’d have hardly seen me.”
“This will do.” Will nodded toward the kitchen. “Beer?”
“Sure.” Travis waited until he was popping the top of the dark German brew to say, “I talked to your mother today. She told me Amy’s murder had similarities to Gillian’s.”
“Similarities?” Will made a sharp sound. “More than that. It was damn near a carbon copy. Too close for coincidence.”
“Why didn’t you call me? This must have stirred up some hellish memories.”
Will deliberately took a swallow, feeling the cold, bitter beer slide down his throat. The pause enabled him to say almost steadily, “You could say that.”
“Do you need to talk about it?”
Will looked at his hand gripping the bottle and realized it was shaking. The tremor was fine enough he hoped his friend hadn’t noticed.
“That’s all I’ve been doing! Even Jimmy McCartin called to talk about it!”
“My fault. I ran into him when I stopped for an espresso on the way up to the hill. I tried to back out the door, but he spotted me before I could make a getaway.” His gaze rested on Will’s hand. So much for not noticing. “Come on, buddy. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
Will turned his back, staring out the small window above the sink. “What is there to say? Some sick son of a bitch thought it would be fun to copy another murder. Maybe it was chance he chose another woman I know. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he picked her because that’s another parallel. Either way… Do you know what he did to her?” Will asked in anguish.
Travis clasped his upper arm, just briefly, a gesture of support not so different from the reassuring slap on the back when one of them struck out on the ballfield, from the squeeze Will had given his arm when he visited him in the hospital after his career-ending pinwheel down the mountain at Kitzbühel. It meant something.
“Yeah,” Travis said. “I know what he did to her.”
Will felt his friend’s scrutiny. He lifted his beer and swallowed.
“Your mother asked me if I could think of anyone who hated you.”
Beer went down the wrong way. Still choking, he gasped, “What?”
“She looked scared, Will.”
Voice thick with fear of a different kind, fear that she was right and he was wrong, Will said, “She’s jumping to conclusions.”
“She’s looking at all the options. She was up at the Butte talking to Doug.”
“And?”
“He worked Wednesday night. He told me after he talked to her that he had been with other people until two in the morning or so. And his roommate swears he never left the condo.”
Will set down the bottle on the counter so hard it clunked. “This has to do with Mendoza.”
“But what?”
“Somebody is trying to get him off. To make everyone think Gilly’s killer is still out there.”
Travis would have made a hell of a lawyer. Mild enough to catch you off guard, he could still corner you. “Not many people are sick enough to kill like that. A man would have to enjoy it. You and I are good friends. I’d do a hell of a lot for you. But rape and murder? Nah.”
Savagely, not wanting to hear the logic, Will said, “You’ve been talking to my father.”
“You know better than that.”
Will closed his eyes. Travis had stuck with him through the worst. And now he was being a jackass.
“Yeah. I know better. I’m sorry.”
Travis just shook his head. “No need. Are you going to be able to start work with this hanging over you?”
“Yeah.” Tension arced through him as if live wires were sparking. “I need to be busy. What am I supposed to do? Sit here and watch soap operas while I wonder if some other woman is being stalked?”
Relentless in his own way, Travis said, “If this guy stalked Amy, then that means he chose her. It had to be her. Why?”
“I don’t know!” Will all but shouted. He paced a couple of steps, turned back, bounced his fist on the counter. “I don’t know. I was using a figure of speech. Probably nobody is being stalked. Chances are the killer just grabbed Amy because she was available…”
“Has your mom figured out where she was snatched from?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Then maybe she wasn’t all that available.” Travis still leaned against the edge of the counter, seemingly relaxed, but his eyes were both watchful and compassionate. “You know, maybe the guy picked her. Maybe he had to plan how to lure her to him.”
“Which brings us back to me.” Will swore under his breath. “What did you tell her?”
“Her?”
“My mother.”
“That I couldn’t think of anyone who hates your guts.”
“That’s the kind of thing I’d know.”
Travis gestured with the beer bottle. “I’m not so sure. If somebody is targeting women because you loved them, he hates you bad. It’s not like this guy is telling the world what an asshole Will Patton is. This is something that eats at him. Takes the stomach lining, then his soul.”
“I’ve put people away…”
“But you hadn’t, back when Gilly was killed.”
“Mendoza…”
“We’re just supposing.”
“That he didn’t kill her.”
“Or that somebody, somehow, put him up to it. Maybe it took that somebody six years to work up the nerve to do the dirty work himself.”
Will wanted to reject a suggestion so unlikely, but he’d spent enough years in the D.A.’s office to know anything was possible.
“Do you remember that guy who set the fires because he blamed my grandfather for his mom’s death?”
Travis accepted the seeming non sequitor. “I remember.”
The first fire had been set inside a pickup truck chosen because it looked exactly like Police Chief Ed Patton’s. The worst was Aunt Abby’s townhouse. She’d barely escaped with her life. Even Will, just sixteen, had been targeted. His bike, parked outside the grocery store, had been squirted with gasoline and set afire.
He remembered how he’d felt, knowing someone had been watching him, following him, hating him. For a while, until they caught the guy, Will had lived with the heightened perceptions of a soldier in a war zone. He’d searched the faces of people in line at the store or sitting in the bleachers at basketball games, been painfully conscious of anyone walking behind him, of every driver behind the wheel of an approaching car. It was like looking through a magnifying glass, so that his vision was both abnormally sharp and a little skewed. He hadn’t trusted that anything was as it seemed.
If he bought into this theory, he would once again feel like an infantryman walking down the street in Fallujah and realizing he’d forgotten to put on his body armor. The smiles of old friends would look like the veiled faces of Iraqi women whose dark eyes were unreadable to that soldier.
Even with friends, he’d have to wonder what he wasn’t seeing, what he might have done to provoke hatred so virulent.
He didn’t want to revisit that kind of paranoia. Every cell in his body rejected the idea that someone he knew, maybe even someone he’d gone to school with, could do something so hideous.
He unclenched his jaw. “You’re reaching. All of you are reaching. This doesn’t have anything to do with me. It has to do with that sick bastard who murdered Gilly, may he rot in prison until the gates of hell open for him.”
“You may be right.” Travis opened the refrigerator and handed Will another beer as if it were an olive branch. “Let’s just hope we find out before another woman gets murdered.”
“Amen to that,” Will agreed, and popped the lid from the bottle. Goddamn it, but his hand was still shaking.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ONLY MAXIMUM SECURITY prison in Oregon, the penitentiary complex in Salem was sprawling and impressive. Trina had never had reason to visit it before. Even at the county jail, she didn’t like hearing metal doors closing behind her. The idea of being shut in forever gave her the willies. Today, she felt uneasy from the moment she drove in the gates.
She showed her credentials and surrendered her weapon, then allowed herself to be escorted to a glassed-in visitor room, furnished only with a single wood table in the middle and two chairs. Grateful she’d been allowed a “contact” visit and wouldn’t have to attempt to interview Ricardo Mendoza through a telephone and thick glass, she set the tape recorder and her notebook on the table. Then, while waiting for him to be brought, she prowled the room. Trina prayed that Lieutenant Patton was right and he’d be eager to talk to her. She’d feel like a failure if she had to go back and admit she couldn’t get him to open up.
A guard escorted a handcuffed inmate past the windows looking into the hall. The inmate shuffled with head bent, lank blond hair shielding his face. A moment later, a man and woman passed, both carrying briefcases and wearing dark suits. Attorneys.
Trina wondered if Will Patton had come here to see inmates when he was an assistant D.A. in Portland. She’d heard that he was a hotshot there, quickly advancing from prosecuting misdemeanors and doing prelims to Domestic Violence and then Major Crimes. Supposedly he hadn’t lost a trial.
So why on earth would he quit and take a job in Butte County, where half a dozen assistant D.A.s handled the entire caseload? Did he think he could make it to District Attorney faster on his own home turf? Most D.A.s seemed to end up being appointed to the bench. Maybe he wanted to be a judge so bad, he’d grabbed for the fastest route.
Or maybe something had gone wrong and his standing had sunk. Will Patton, she suspected, wasn’t the man to hang his head and accept a demotion to some unit like Consumer Protection or Juvenile Crime. He might have to handle those cases in Butte County—all the D.A.s did—but he’d also get a shot at the big cases. The headliners. The ones that would put his face on the nightly news.
More footsteps in the hall. Why was she thinking about Will Patton? Trina turned to face the door.
She’d seen the photo taken of Ricardo Mendoza when he was booked. Not much more than a kid, he’d stared at the camera with a mix of defiance, fear and feigned indifference. The man who nodded at the guard and stepped into the room had changed in ways that had more to do with being an inmate than with the six years that had passed.
In the blue prison garb, he looked thin and tough. A scar, pale against swarthy skin, curled from his temple onto his cheek. No longer the cocky young man, he was still handsome despite the disfigurement, the complete lack of expression on his face and the lines carved by bitterness. She thought she saw a flicker of interest in his dark eyes as he studied her, but that might be because she was a woman, not because of her mission or her job.
“Mr. Mendoza,” she said. “I’m Detective Giallombardo. Thank you for agreeing to see me.”
“It’s not like I have anything else to do.” He went to the chair on the far side of the table, facing the glass wall and the guard who waited outside the room.
Trina sat across from him.
When she didn’t immediately begin, he said, “You here to find out what makes me tick, so you’ll be able to catch other guys like me?”
He was curious after all. She was interested, too, in the irony in his voice.
“I’m actually hoping you’ll tell me about the night Gillian Pappas died.”
His body jerked. Good, she’d surprised him.
“What’s the point of that?”
“I’ve read your testimony. I’m hoping to hear what happened, as well as you can recollect it. Including anything you weren’t able to say in the courtroom.” She held up her hand when he started to speak. “I promise, I’ll tell you why, but I’d like to hear your story first, un-colored by what I have to say.”
She’d thought his face expressionless. Now, for a moment, emotions she could only guess at boiled to the surface. Finally, he gave a jerky nod.
“Like I said, I got nothing better to do.”
“Thank you. Do you mind if I tape the interview?”
He shrugged. “Why would I?”
Trina turned on the recorder and had him repeat his consent. Then she began. “When did you move to Elk Springs?”
He answered her questions, explaining that his father was a migrant worker, but legal, and that he, Ricky, had been born in this country. His parents still followed the harvests: strawberries, peas, apples, even tulip bulbs in Skagit County in Washington State. He had managed to graduate from high school and learn some mechanics along the way. Two years before Gillian Pappas’s murder, Ricardo Mendoza had gotten a job in Elk Springs, at an auto body repair shop.
“They had this bullshit reason for firing me.” Remembered anger roughened his voice. “That’s when I got drunk and stole a car from the shop. I wrecked it on purpose. Yeah, I know. I was a goddamn genius.”
Yeah, he’d shoplifted, too, when he first got to Elk Springs. “I was hungry,” he said with a shrug. And, sure, he’d beaten the crap out of this guy who’d insulted Ricardo’s girlfriend in a bar one night. “I had a temper.”
After plea bargaining, he’d done six months for the auto theft. “Detective Patton actually put in a word for me. She helped me get a job when I got out. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have stayed in Elk Springs.” His laugh was harsh. “Big favor, huh? God, I wish she hadn’t done me any favor.”
No, his girlfriend hadn’t stuck by him. He didn’t have a girlfriend after he got out of the joint.
He’d worked the day Gillian Pappas was murdered. It wasn’t as good a job as his last one, it didn’t take any skill, all he was doing was changing oil in one of those quickie places where people sat in their cars while guys with oil embedded under their fingernails worked in the pit, but it was okay.
“I mean, I figured, six months, a year.” He shrugged. “I could show what a good employee I was. Then maybe a car dealer would hire me. Detective Patton…” His face closed.
“Detective Patton?”
“She knew someone at the Subaru dealership. She said she’d talk to him.”
No wonder the lieutenant had wanted Trina to come alone. She’d had more history with Mendoza than she’d admitted. It sounded as if he’d been some kind of project of hers. Cops sometimes got involved this way, when they thought someone had gotten a raw deal or maybe just believed they saw a spark in someone who’d made bad choices. They thought if they fanned a little, the spark would burst into a warm, crackling fire. Sometimes it even worked. People did get raw deals. Kids with crappy backgrounds could turn around because someone said, “I see promise in you. I know you can do better.”
But Ricky Mendoza hadn’t turned his life around, according to a jury of his peers. Instead, he’d brutally raped and murdered Gillian Pappas. Trina didn’t like imagining what the lieutenant had felt, knowing that without her intervention Mendoza would probably still have been in prison.
“After you got off work that day, what did you do?” Trina asked.
“I went home and had dinner, then decided to go have a couple beers at this bar. Maybe shoot some pool.” He was silent for a moment, looking at Trina but seeming no longer to see her. “I stayed a couple hours. I was about to go when I saw this girl come in.”
“Did you approach her?”
“Not at first. I figured she was meeting someone. But I kept an eye on her. She ordered a drink, then another one real fast. A couple guys hit on her, but she handled them. I went to take a leak, and when I came back this guy was giving her a hard time. I gave him a shove and told him to back off. I guess she was grateful, because she asked my name.”
“Did she tell you hers?”
“Yeah, Gilly. Gilly Pappas.”
He described how they talked. She had another drink, and he persuaded her to eat some chicken wings because he could see she was getting plastered.
“All of a sudden she stood up and said, ‘You wanna screw?’”
“Did anyone else hear her?”
“I don’t think so. I guess people did see us leaving together. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention, but turns out I was wrong.”
“What did you say?”
“I asked if she was getting back at someone. She grabbed my shirt and said, ‘Do you care?’”
“Did you?”
For the first time, he looked angry. “Shit, yeah, I cared! She was…she was classy. Okay? I knew that, but we really talked, and I thought…” He jerked his shoulders. “Well, I quit thinking. I’d have rather it wasn’t revenge sex. You know? But it had been a while, and she was real pretty. So I said, ‘No.’”
“You lied.”
“Yeah, I lied. So sue me.” He guffawed. “No, convict me of murder. Worked even better, didn’t it?”
“Please tell me what happened next.”
Lightning-quick, he reverted to anger. “What do you think happened? She came out to my car, told me to drive back to the alley and park. Then she unzipped my pants, lifted her skirt and bit my neck. She didn’t want to come back to my place, and she didn’t want pretty. Afterward, I thought she’d wanted to get it over with as fast as possible. It was like something she had to do.”
“Did you have a condom?”
“No, and she didn’t ask me to put one on. I figured she was on the pill or something. Or maybe too drunk to care. I don’t know. I wish I’d worn a condom.”
Trina bet he did.
“Did you talk at all after?”
“No. She got real quiet. Scrambled into her panties and adjusted her clothes like she felt dirty. She started to get out and I told her I’d drive her back to her car. She shook her head and just took off. Walking so fast she was almost running. I drove around the block and saw her come around the side of the bar. She was crying. I felt like shit.” He fell silent.
“Did you see her get into her car?”
He shook his head. “It was one-thirty, two o’clock. The place was still busy. The parking lot’s not that well-lit. She kind of disappeared behind a pickup.”
“What did you do then?”
“I drove home. Got up, went to work in the morning. We listened to the radio in the shop. Late afternoon, I hear about this woman’s body that was found. I didn’t think anything about it. That night, I see her face on TV. That’s when I started to feel scared.”
“Did you consider going to the police and telling them that you thought you were the last person to see her alive?”
“Sure,” he jeered. “Yeah. I screwed this girl without a condom, she bit my neck and drew blood, her fingerprints are all over my car, and anybody is going to believe I didn’t kill her? Well, here’s a news flash.” He looked around as if in exaggerated surprise at their surroundings. “Nobody did believe me.”
She wanted to argue that it might have been different if he’d come forward on his own. But she wasn’t so sure. It had looked bad. His semen, her fingerprints in his car, the wound on his neck and scratches on his shoulder. His skin under her fingernails. The cops had had Gillian Pappas’s boyfriend saying, “She would never have had sex with a strange man she picked up in a bar.” And then they’d had Ricky Mendoza, a seeming loser with a record that included violence because of his temper. How could they call it any different?
“Did you have friends, family, to give you character references?”
She saw a flash of pain on his face.
“My parents. They came a couple of times. But they don’t speak such good English. They kept saying, ‘You wouldn’t kill no girl, would you? We raised you to respect girls.’”
“You must have other family.”
“Because we’re Catholic? You think I must have ten brothers and sisters? Well, I don’t. Just a sister. She’s ten years older than I am. Back then, she was already married and had kids. Her husband had cancer. I think he got it from using so many pesticides in the fields. You know? But he was an illegal, so who cares? He died, and she had enough to do, raising three kids.”
“You never heard from her?”
“She called once and said, ‘I’m sorry, what happened to you, Ricky. I know you wouldn’t hurt some woman like that.’” He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. “She sends me a Christmas present. And she writes sometimes.”
“How old are her children?” Trina asked softly.
“Her oldest is eleven, her youngest is six. Ricardo. They named him after me.” He sounded both proud and defiant, as if to say, Somebody thinks I’m worth naming a son after.
“Do you have other family? Cousins?”
His mood shifted. His eyes narrowed. “Why do you care?”
“I’ll explain, I promise.”
In a hard voice, Ricky Mendoza said, “I have cousins back in Mexico. Not here.”
“Friends?”
“Nobody who stuck around once I was arrested.”
Mildly shocked, she asked, “So people who knew you thought you might have done it?”
“I don’t know if they thought that, or just didn’t want anything to do with the cops. They were, like, people I had drinks with. My best buddy, he got knifed in prison. He ran this chop shop, see. Three months inside, and he was dead.” Another shrug, more feigned indifference.
“Let me ask you this, Mr. Mendoza.” Trina leaned forward. “Can you think of anyone who cares enough about you to try to get you out of here?”
He was either a heck of an actor, or he was stunned. “Get me out of here? You mean, like someone’s planning a break?”
“No,” Trina said. “Not a break. Someone murdered another woman and displayed her body in exactly the same way Gillian Pappas’s was displayed. The crime is almost a perfect copycat.”
“You think…” He swallowed. “You think someone did that so it would look like I couldn’t have murdered Gilly. So you’d get a pardon for me because I must not have done it.”
“We think it’s a possibility that’s the motive. Yes.”
“Nobody would do that for me.” He actually shuddered. “You think somebody would do something like that just to help out a friend?”
“We do think it’s a possibility,” she repeated.
“Yeah, well, the only people who care about me are my family, and they’re not murderers!” He flattened his hands on the table and half rose. “You’re not going to be trying to haul them in, are you?”
She didn’t move and kept her voice nonthreatening. “We might look into their whereabouts. That’s all.”
“They live in Union Gap. They wouldn’t be down here. It’s winter. There’s nothing to pick.”
“If we can verify that, they’ll be out of the picture.”
His angry stare clashed with her steady one. Finally he dipped his head abruptly and sank back into the chair. After a moment, he asked, “This girl. The one that was killed. Did she look like Gilly?”
“Yes. Quite a lot like her.”
“What was her name?”
“Amy Owen. She grew up in Elk Springs.” She paused a beat. “Did you know her?”
“Why would I know her? I told you. Girls like Gilly. They didn’t pay attention to someone like me.” His bitterness could have etched metal. “Not unless they wanted to piss someone off.”
She wondered if that was true. Ricky Mendoza had been a handsome young man. Possibly a little wicked looking. But if his story was true, he was essentially decent. He’d made the effort to follow Gillian Pappas to her car, to ensure she was safe. He must have seemed a godsend to her, a nice enough guy she could imagine having sex with him, but also rough enough around the edges to make him different from Will Patton. Someone whose identity she could fling at Will, use to hurt him.
What she had never dreamed was that the one who would end up hurt was Ricky Mendoza.
Because she ended up dead.
“Did it ever occur to you,” Ricky asked now, “that maybe I didn’t kill Gilly? That maybe the guy who did is still out there? That this Amy’s murder wasn’t a copy? It was the real thing?”
“You were convicted of Gillian Pappas’s murder.” She hesitated, debated, then said very carefully, “However, that possibility is also one we have to consider.” She clicked off the recorder and rose to her feet. “Mr. Mendoza, thank you for your cooperation.”
Looking as though she’d elbowed him in the gut, he sat gaping at her.
She nodded and walked out, passing the guard on his way in.
A WEEK AGO, his mother had asked him to Sunday-night dinner. Nice to have her seem disconcerted to have him show up.
“Will!”
“Do I have the wrong night?”
“No! No, of course not. Come in. I’ve just been crazy with this murder….” Her voice trailed off and she let him in. “Sorry.”
“At least you’re having dinner at home tonight.” He knew from experience that she might eat fast food for a week straight when she was pursuing a fresh case.
She laughed. “Scott’s amazed. He’s actually the one cooking tonight.”
“Come to a dead end?”
His mother hesitated. “Maybe. No one close to Amy looks like a viable possibility.”
Following her toward the kitchen, he said, “That’s because Amy is such an unlikely victim. I mean, I know beautiful women who enjoy enraging men. Amy isn’t—wasn’t—like that.”
“So everyone keeps repeating. Why Amy? they ask.” She sounded frustrated. “I have to say, ‘I don’t know.’ If we knew why she was chosen, we’d be halfway to making an arrest.”
“You working with someone in the D.A.’s office?”
“I talked to Louis Fein. Since I don’t even have a suspect, we didn’t have much to say.”
Her husband, Scott McNeil, was stirring something on the stove. A big, athletic man with auburn hair graying a little at the temples, he grinned. “Hey, Will.”
“Scott.” He glanced around. “Are Emily and Evan here?”
“Evan’s playing Nintendo. Emily is on the phone. She’s always on the phone. She’s been on the phone or the computer since the day she turned twelve. She only goes to school because her friends are there.”
“Hey, maybe I’ll go whip Evan’s ass.”
Scott muttered, “I wouldn’t count on it.”
Meg laughed. “Do you hear the note of wounded ego? Dad got badly beaten last night.”
“You know, it’s not skill.” Will shook his head. “You shouldn’t feel bad. It’s age. You can’t help it. Those reflexes start to go…”
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Janice Kay Johnson
A chilling blast from the past…Six years ago prosecutor Will Patton's girlfriend stormed out on him. That night she was brutally raped and murdered. The violent act knocked Will's world out from under him, alienating him from his family, who Will believed were responsible. Wrapped up in his own guilt and anger, Will developed a powerful thirst for justice…and was determined that no criminal would ever walk free again.Now he's returned to his hometown, but he is greeted by a gruesome discovery–another body and an all-too-familiar calling card. And once again the victim is romantically linked with Will. In order to track down this serial killer, Will teams up with rookie detective Trina Giallombardo–only to realize that if he falls for her, she'll be next….
Will tried to remember how well Gilly and Amy knew each other
They hadn’t been friends—nothing like that, but Amy was part of the crowd he’d introduced Gilly to. They had looked a little bit alike. Both five-eight or nine, leggy, boyishly slim, naturally blond. Neither blue-eyed. Gillian had had pale, almost sea-green eyes, Amy… He couldn’t quite picture them. Brown? No, not brown. Flecks of yellow and green.
Dead. Because, like Gillian, she was tall and blond and willowy? But their killers weren’t the same man. Couldn’t be the same man. Mendoza was guilty, guilty, guilty. A scum who had no business hitting on Will’s girlfriend in the bar, becoming enraged because she’d rejected him, raping, murdering, taunting.
Had Amy been chosen precisely because she looked like Gillian? A copycat crime required a copycat victim. But who in hell would imitate something like this? Could Elk Springs really have spawned two monsters?
It made no sense. Gilly’s murder by a man who’d hot-wired cars and fenced stolen goods but never committed a violent crime. This one now, six years later. Why Amy? Why now? A stranger, killed like Gillian, would have been bad enough, but Amy! Less than a week after they met again, talked about old times, flirted a little.
He went cold. Was that why she’d been chosen? Because he’d flirted with her? Because she’d once meant something to him?
Dead Wrong
Janice Kay Johnson
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Dear Reader,
When Harlequin asked me to do a Signature Select Saga story, possibly linked to one of my previous Superromance trilogies, of course it was PATTON’S DAUGHTERS that leaped to mind. I have other favorites among my books, but for some reason the characters in this trilogy and in Jack Murray, Sheriff, which followed, are more real to me than any others I’ve created. The sisters had such distinct voices, self-images and self-doubts. Writing those books, I sometimes felt as if I was channeling their stories, not making them up! In the back of my mind, I’ve always meant to revisit them. And what an opportunity…
Now if only I hadn’t made Meg Patton’s son, Will, such a well-adjusted young man. Note to self: plan ahead. However, even well-adjusted people get a little skewed when tragedy rends the fabric of their lives. Especially when they’re left with a heavy load of guilt. Poor Will! Things have now gone very wrong since you last met him as a nice college student who was close to his mother and father.
I’d been contemplating a book about a serial killer for a while, too. So, here’s hoping you enjoy meeting the Pattons again, or for the first time, and that this particular serial killer keeps you awake a little too late tonight!
Best,
Janice
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
EPILOGUE
BONUS FEATURES
CHAPTER ONE
GETTING THERE five minutes quicker wouldn’t make any difference. They weren’t racing to the rescue. They were going to view a corpse. Nonetheless, Meg Patton drove fast, with fierce concentration. If Detective Giallombardo said anything, Meg didn’t hear.
This wouldn’t turn out to be anything like the other murder, she kept assuring herself. The detail the kid who called 911 had blurted out would be an aside, something dropped at the scene, not a deliberate choice of murder weapon and staging. She’d feel like an idiot for tearing out here when she was supposed to supervise detectives, not respond to calls. She had already seen the way heads swiveled when she’d stood abruptly and said, “I’ll take this one.”
She’d garnered more surprise when she’d glanced around, choosing young Giallombardo almost randomly. Eenie, meenie, minie, mo. “Are you tied up? Then come with me.” Everyone in the squad room had stared after them.
Butte Road ran yardstick straight for miles between rusting barbed wire fences holding back brown heaps of tumbleweed before terminating at a small volcanic cinder cone. The pavement turned to gravel not much beyond the Elk Springs city limits. Most of the year, their SUV would have raised a red cloud of cinder dust to trail them like a tail. Today, the hard-packed surface was frozen solid.
She drove this road every few weeks. Her sister Renee, the Elk Springs chief of police, lived out here on the Triple B Ranch with her husband, Daniel, and her two young children. Meg barely spared a glance for their gate when she tore by it. Renee would want to hear about the murder, even if it was outside her jurisdiction. Cops didn’t like brutal murders happening in their own backyards. Even if, in this case, that backyard was a whole heck of a lot of empty country.
One of a half dozen in the immediate vicinity of Elk Springs, this lava cone, no more than a couple hundred feet high, wasn’t even dignified with a name, as far as Meg knew. The county had once contemplated using its cinders for road construction, until Matt Barnard of the Triple B made a stink about having trucks roaring up and down his road all day long. After that, it was left in peace, except for Friday-night beer parties and fornicating teenagers.
A lone pickup truck sat in the turnaround at the end of the road. Two heads in it, real close together. Kids, cuddling against the horror they had suddenly understood walked their world.
Meg was careful to pull in right behind them, so as not to further damage any visible tire prints.
Uh-huh, her inner voice jeered. On frozen cinders.
She killed the engine and got out, slamming the door and then pausing for just a minute to take in the surroundings. The bitter cold stung her skin.
Funny how a dead body could give a familiar landscape a surreal look. The view out here was spectacular, with high country desert stretching to the horizon in one direction, brown and stark in winter. The jagged peaks of the Sisters sliced the sky to the west, while Juanita Butte seemed to float to the north like a perfect scoop of vanilla ice cream. A few thin patches of snow clung to the cinder cone and the red-brown soil between tumbleweeds. The sky was a cold, crystal blue, the stillness absolute.
Until Detective Giallombardo also slammed her door and crunched around the rear of the Explorer to join Meg.
In silence, the two women walked forward, both staring at the woman’s naked body sprawled low on the slope of the cinder cone. Head uphill, resting on the pillow of a patch of snow.
In life, she had been long-legged and shapely. In death, she was bluish-white against the rust-red cinders, with the dark stain of bruises discoloring her flesh. Even before they closed the distance, Meg could see that her left breast had been mangled. Torn by an animal after death, maybe, although Meg thought that unlikely.
But the detail that riveted her was the jockstrap. The elastic of the waistband sliced into the victim’s neck. The cup had been twisted to cover her face.
A message, or a gesture of contempt for the victim. Maybe for all women. Meg never had known. The man who had killed in exactly this way, who had left the body posed just as this one was posed, had insisted he was innocent. Was still protesting his innocence from the state penitentiary, where he was serving a life sentence.
Feeling sick, she said, “I’ll talk to the kids. You call for a crime scene crew. We need pictures.”
Giallombardo nodded and went back to the Explorer.
Meg knocked on the window of the pickup and then opened the driver side door.
“Chris Singer?”
The girl, a waif with a blotchy face and red, swollen eyes, nodded.
“And you are?” Meg asked the boy.
“Colin Glaser.” He was trying to sound manly. The squeak at the end undermined his effort. He gazed through the windshield toward the ghastly sight. “That woman… She’s, like, dead.”
“Yes, I’m afraid she is.” Meg heard the grimness in her own voice.
He shuddered.
Meg looked at both of them. “Can you tell me when you arrived? Did you get out of the pickup? Touch anything?”
In unison, their heads shook violently. “We never got out,” the boy said. “I wanted to get the hell—the heck out of here, but when I started to back up Chris said we should call 911. And wait until the cops got here. So we locked the doors and that’s what we did.”
“We were only here like a minute before we phoned,” the girl said.
They’d been cutting school, Meg learned, because they had been having a relationship crisis. Despite the boy’s comforting arm around the girl, Meg guessed the relationship was dead now. Chris had called her dad, who was on his way out here. He wasn’t going to be a happy man.
She thanked them for being responsible, then left them to wait for the girl’s father.
“Let’s take a closer look,” Meg said to Detective Giallombardo, who obediently followed her. Both slipped on the slope of red cinders as they scrambled the eight or ten feet up, then edged toward the body.
Unless bloodstains provided a trail—and they were going to be a bitch to spot on volcanic cinders this color—it was going to be impossible to tell where the UNSUB parked, whether he dragged or carried the body, etc. How much Luminol did it take to spot blood in a landscape this vast? Footprints and ruts didn’t last in loose cinders, which tended to rattle downslope to fill any hole even when there was still a foot in it. Meg knew, because she’d climbed up to the crater several times as a teenager.
She crouched beside the victim, Giallombardo standing right above her.
Legs splayed in a grotesquely inviting gesture of sexual come-on. The savage bite marks on the breast were made by human teeth, if Meg was any judge. Maybe they’d get lucky and at least get a decent bite impression to match up with a suspect later. Arms spread to each side. The victim had been allowed no dignity in death.
And then there was the jockstrap. To appearances, it had been used to strangle the woman. It looked brand-new. Bought for the purpose.
This wasn’t chance. The staging was identical to the murder six years ago that had cost Meg her son in every meaningful way, though he still dutifully arrived at her door for family holidays.
She didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until Giallombardo said, “Identical to what?”
Meg froze, her instinct to keep family history private until such time as there was no option. But when it came down to it, she’d been a cop too long to hide evidence.
“The crew’s coming,” she said, glad of an excuse to put off the moment of truth.
“And Dad,” the young female cop observed.
A red SUV was gaining fast on the official convoy. It fishtailed once but didn’t even slow. As a parent, Meg understood.
She and Giallombardo scrambled and slid their way back down to the foot of the lava cone. Crime scene techs bundled up as they climbed out of vehicles—as afternoon fell, the air became icier. Meg estimated the day hadn’t reached ten degrees Fahrenheit when the sun was at its height, and the temp had probably already dropped to six or eight degrees with sub-zero to come tonight. Her cheeks and nose were numb.
She directed the crew to get them started, some spreading out to search for evidence, the photographer beginning to snap pictures, the coroner waiting to get to the body. The girl’s dad erupted from his SUV almost before it skidded to a stop, and she flung herself right over her boyfriend into Daddy’s arms.
Meg introduced herself, explained the situation and asked if he’d drive both kids back to town. “We’ve got his pickup boxed in.” To the boy, she said, “Colin, can you get someone to bring you out here tomorrow after school to get your pickup?”
He nodded.
To his credit, the father squeezed the boy’s shoulder and said, “Come on, son. Your mom home from work yet?” He led the two away and was soon backing out.
Meg leaned against the fender of her black Explorer. The young cop who’d been promoted to detective all of a month ago waited with a patience Meg admired.
Trina Giallombardo had risen fast in the ranks. She was only twenty-six, twenty-seven. A local girl who had gone to Oregon State to college, then come home. As a cop, she was smart, steady, mature beyond her years and dedicated. When Meg had interviewed her for the promotion, she’d claimed to have always wanted to be a detective.
She wore her thick, shiny dark hair drawn tightly into a bun. Big brown eyes dominated an olive-complected face that gave an impression of stubbornness and intelligence rather than beauty.
Meg would have given anything to have Ben Shea, her longtime partner and brother-in-law, here instead. But Ben had broken his idiot leg—thank God not his neck—trying to keep up with Abby on the ski hill. His leg was still in traction.
But why did I have to bring a novice? Meg asked herself. Instinct? She didn’t have a clue.
Gaze on the crew, spread out like giant ants below their hill, she finally answered Giallombardo’s question. “Six years ago, we had a murder that looked just like this one.”
“Six years…” Giallombardo frowned. “I was away at college. Wait. Not Will’s girlfriend?”
“You know my son?”
“Only by sight.” Did red tinge her cheeks? Hard to tell, with both their faces damn near frostbitten. “I was two years behind him in school. But I saw him play basketball. And since he was president of the student body…”
Meg nodded. “His girlfriend was raped and murdered when she came home with him for spring break from college. She was strangled with a jockstrap, and the cup was pulled over her face. She was posed just like that.”
“Oh.” The young cop exhaled the single, soft word.
They stood in silence while she processed the implications. “Isn’t that your brother-in-law’s ranch up the road?”
The fact that this body had been dumped so close to her sister’s home was already bothering Meg. Their family had been targeted once before. Surely not again. Surely this had nothing to do with the Pattons. It was happenstance that the previous victim had been Will’s girlfriend. She’d gone to a bar on her own and left with the killer. She’d probably never even mentioned her boyfriend or the fight they’d just had.
Giallombardo interrupted her thoughts. “Did you catch the killer?”
Meg nodded. “He’s supposed to be serving life.”
They both glanced involuntarily toward the body.
“Paroled?”
“We’ll find out.”
The photographer signaled the coroner, and the two women joined him. Sanchez, an elected official, had run unopposed for as long as Meg had been with the Butte County Sheriff’s Department. Unlike some elected coroners or medical examiners, he was good.
“Don’t see any surprises,” he said after a minute. “Looks like strangulation. See how deep the elastic has cut into her throat?”
They saw.
“Time of death?”
He hemmed and hawed. This cold made it harder to tell. It was like putting a body in deep freeze. “You find any ID?”
“So far, we haven’t even found her panties.”
He nodded. “I’m thinking last night,” he finally concluded. “Maybe twelve hours ago. You might look for a young woman who waited bar, say, and didn’t make it home.”
“Okay.” Meg was trying to take notes. She hoped they were readable. Either she wore gloves, or her fingers went numb. She alternated.
“Let’s take a look at the face,” the coroner suggested. “Then roll her.”
Meg struggled to pull a latex glove onto her right hand, then reached out and tugged the jockstrap to one side.
The victim’s mouth was frozen open as if in a scream, the grotesquely swollen tongue protruding.
“Was he hiding her face?” Giallombardo whispered. “If anything would shock you…” Before Meg could comment, the young detective was already shaking her head. “No. He posed her. He didn’t kill her out here. She would have been scraped by cinders when she struggled. And if he, uh, penetrated her, he’d have had to expose his penis.”
The coroner actually hunched, as if the very idea of baring himself to the sub-freezing air was so hideous he couldn’t prevent a physical reaction.
“Plus he’d have had to kneel on the cinders… No.”
Meg agreed. “She was already dead when he carried her here. A man horrified by his crime flees. He doesn’t lay out the victim so carefully.”
“He has to be a local. To know to come out here.”
“That thought has occurred to me.” Meg nodded at the victim. “You’re local. Do you recognize her?”
Giallombardo swallowed. Meg watched as she focused on the face, made herself look past the distended tongue. To study glazed eyes that might have been hazel, the tiny mole on one high cheekbone…
“Oh, God,” she whispered.
“You do know her.”
Her breath rattled in her chest and she nodded dumbly.
“Who is she?”
Giallombardo swallowed again. Against nausea, Meg guessed. “Amy Owen. She might not be anymore. I mean, she might have gotten married. But in high school, that was her name.”
Disquiet struck again. “That sounds familiar.”
“I think…” The detective was taking quick, shallow breaths. “I think Will dated her.”
Air hissed from between Meg’s teeth.
“He brought girls out here. Sometimes.”
With quick alarm, she thought, Not Trina Giallombardo. Boy, would that complicate things. “How do you know?” she asked, aware she sounded harsh.
Her deputy didn’t want to meet her eyes. “Not because…” She closed her eyes, obviously struggling to regain her composure. When she spoke again, her voice was devoid of emotion. “I heard girls talk. That’s all.”
Meg’s eyes narrowed. Was there some history here of which she was unaware? Damn it, had the young Trina Giallombardo had a crush on Will? If so, should she be jettisoned from the case?
But they didn’t know that this had anything to do with Will.
Please God.
“I came out here when I was a teenager,” she heard herself say. She was distantly aware that the other two were gaping. “With Will’s father.”
After what she realized was an appalled silence, Giallombardo said, “Um…I suppose almost everyone in Elk Springs has.”
The coroner looked up at Meg with shrewd eyes. “You sure Mendoza is still locked up?”
“We should have been informed if he came up for parole.” Meg stared down at the body. “Let’s roll her.”
Between rigor mortis and freezing, the job wasn’t easy. Despite the cold, Giallombardo looked green by the time they were done.
The backside revealed lividity and more bruising, nothing else.
Meg raised her voice. “Let’s bag her. People, has anyone found anything?”
General shakes of the head. No tracks, no discarded clothing, no convenient cigarette butts that didn’t look as if they’d been left last summer. Truthfully, Meg hadn’t expected anything different. The unknown subject—or UNSUB, to cops—had driven out here with the dead woman likely in his trunk. Maybe at night, maybe this morning. He’d carried her a few feet up the slope of the lava cone, splayed her limbs, adjusted the jockstrap like a man adding a flourish to his signature and left.
How in hell had he known every detail? Had he seen the body? Could there have been two murderers? Had he stumbled on the body before the cops found it? Or, she thought with a jolt, was this killer a cop?
And, whoever he was, why had he waited six years to imitate the previous rape and murder?
“Lieutenant?”
She knew on one level that Sanchez was talking to her, but still she stared down at the body and asked herself the one question she’d been avoiding.
What if Ricky Mendoza’s protestations of innocence were real? What if he didn’t do it?
And what if the real killer had been shocked by what he’d done? What if he’d been able to suppress his sexual perversion for six years—until something triggered his rage?
Something, say, like the fact that Will Patton had just moved back to Elk Springs?
Common sense revolted. No! Damn it, they had Mendoza cold. She’d been sorry, because she liked the kid, but he had to have been the killer. She was letting a mother’s fear intrude, and if she couldn’t think with the cool logic of a cop instead, she’d be the one who had to step back from this investigation.
“Sorry,” she said, forcing herself to look up. “What’s your question?”
“HEARD ANYTHING LAST NIGHT? Or early this morning?” As withered as the winter sagebrush, the old woman stared suspiciously through the six-inch gap between door and frame. Either she was worried about keeping the heat in, or this intruder out.
“Yes, ma’am,” Trina said politely.
“We’re to bed by nine o’clock.”
Trina wouldn’t have minded being invited inside. She was freezing on the doorstep with the sun sinking fast. This was the fourth house she’d stopped at, and at only one had she been asked in and offered coffee. The few swallows she’d managed were a distant, tantalizing memory.
She strove for a conversational tone. “You must not get much traffic out on Butte Road at night.”
The old woman looked at her as if she were simple. “Saturday nights, it’s like living next to Highway 20. All those young hands that work the ranches, they come hootin’ and hollerin’ by, two, three in the morning. Lean on their horns, stereos blasting to shake the windows. They even race sometimes.” Her mouth thinned. “They turn onto our property, we get out the shotgun.”
Trina considered mentioning that the law did not entitle a property owner to shoot someone for turning into his driveway.
Instead, she surreptitiously wriggled her fingers inside her gloves to see if they still functioned and said, “Last night wasn’t Saturday.”
“Some of them get drunk other nights, too.”
Heaven send her patience.
“I’m sure they do.” She shook her head as if scandalized. The old biddy. “Was last night one of those nights? You hear anybody heading home late?”
“Might have.”
“Can you recall what time that was?”
Mrs. Bailey’s lips folded near out of sight, as if it pained her to give a straight answer. Finally she sniffed. “Two-thirty-five. On a Thursday night. Then the fool turned around and went back to town. Bars shouldn’t be open that late.”
Despite her surge of excitement, Trina pointed out, “Someone might have been giving a friend a ride home.”
Silence, followed by a grudging, “Might have been.”
“Are you certain you heard the same vehicle coming and going?”
“Course I am! Wouldn’t have said it if I hadn’t meant it.”
Maybe it was perversity that had her suggesting, “One pickup truck sounds an awful lot like another.”
The woman didn’t like explaining herself. After crimping her lips and thinking about it, she said, “This one sounded like my Rufus out there. Don’t bark often, but when he does, you best jump.”
“A deep, powerful engine.”
“Isn’t that what I said?”
Her own lips were going numb. “Did you notice when the truck came back?”
“Didn’t look at the clock.” She chewed it over. “Twenty minutes. Half hour.”
The timing was just right.
“Mrs. Bailey, do you think you’ve heard this particular engine before?”
“Can’t say.”
“Would you recognize it again?”
“Might.”
Trina gave her most winning smile, which considering she couldn’t feel most of her face might look more like a death mask. “You’ve been a great help, Mrs. Bailey. We may need to speak to you again. In the meantime, I appreciate your cooperation.”
With no “You’re welcome,” or even a “Mind you don’t slip on the steps,” the old lady slammed the door shut in Trina’s face. A dead bolt lock thudded home.
If she wasn’t so darn cold, Trina would have laughed. She hurried to the Explorer she was driving, started it and cranked up the heat. Intermittent shivers wracked her. But at least she’d learned something that might be useful, she thought with a small glow of triumph. Useful enough, maybe, that Lieutenant Patton would let her keep working the case.
She couldn’t believe her luck to have been singled out today, and by Lieutenant Patton, of all people. Trina had become a cop because she wanted to be just like Meg Patton and her two sisters, the one Elk Springs police chief, the other an arson investigator. From the time she was eleven or twelve she’d read about their exploits in the newspaper, and since Will went to the high school people had talked, too. Lieutenant Patton had been the county Youth Officer back when Trina was in high school, so she’d talked at assemblies or in Trina’s classes a couple of times a year. Trina thought she was amazing—beautiful and brave and smart. Everything Trina wanted to be.
In her interview for the promotion to detective Trina had almost blurted out something about how much she’d always admired the lieutenant. Thank goodness she’d been able to stop herself. Even if it was true, it would have sounded like the worst brown-nosing.
Now here she was, hardly a month later, partnered with her. Despite her shivers, Trina still marveled. Junior partner, of course. The lieutenant had gone back to the station to find out whether the killer from six years ago had somehow gotten out of prison and also to try to discover whether other jurisdictions had had murders with this same M.O. Lucky Trina had been assigned one patrol officer to help her canvass the houses along Butte Road.
But it had to be done, and she was pretty excited to have actually learned something. Maybe. Unless the deep-throated pickup or SUV had just been dropping some drunk ranch hand back at the Triple B or the Running Y. Except she’d stopped at the Triple B herself and no ranch hands had admitted to being out late last night. She’d find out from Officer Buttram whether the same was true at the Running Y. Those were the only two working ranches past the Bailey’s place.
An hour and a half later, she hadn’t learned a thing. Buttram and she agreed to meet back at the station.
There, he shook his head. His ruddy face glowed. “Bitch of a night.”
“I would have traded my right arm for a thermos of coffee.”
“With a dash of whiskey.” He took off his sheepskin-lined gloves. “Nobody heard nothing.”
“I found somebody who did. A Mrs. Bailey.”
Her sense of triumph dimmed at the sight of his face.
“There’s a nasty one.”
“She calls in complaints?”
“Once a month or so.” He shook his head. “Hates the neighbors, hates teenagers, doesn’t much like cows. You believe her, somebody is always being noisy or trespassing.”
Noisy? “I don’t remember a house near hers.”
“She has damn fine hearing.”
Trina quizzed him about who he’d talked to at the Running Y, then went to Lieutenant Patton’s office.
Through the glass inset, she saw the lieutenant lift her head at the sound of the knock. She waved Trina in.
“You look cold.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her superior scowled. “Quit ma’aming me.”
“Sir…”
“That isn’t any better. You make me feel old.”
“Lieutenant.”
“A slight improvement.” She sighed. “I suppose that was an exercise in futility?”
“Actually, I did get one report of unusual traffic.”
Brows rose. “Really?”
Trina repeated what Mrs. Bailey said. “I understand she’s something of a crank….”
“She?”
“Mrs. Bailey?”
“Not Luella Bailey! She’s a thorn in the side of anyone who has dealings with her. Daniel—my brother-in-law—counts his blessings daily that his place isn’t beside hers. Pete Hardesty of the Running Y gets hell every time a steer finds a fence break.”
Crushed and trying to hide it, Trina asked, “Does that mean she’s not reliable?”
“Hmm.” Meg Patton rubbed her chin as she thought. “Well, she’s not delusional. When she says a steer is eating her dahlias, by God there it is. Kids do drag race out on Butte Road. So…no. She might actually be a good witness. Most folks out there wouldn’t pay any mind to a passing vehicle. Luella, though, lives to find grievances.” Her gaze sharpened. “Tell me again what she said.”
Trina did.
“Twenty minutes to half an hour. That would be about right.”
Trina nodded at the phone. “Did you learn anything?”
“Ricky Mendoza is right where he should be. That lets him out. No sign of Amy’s Kia. I sent someone to check her apartment complex and the lots outside the brewhouses and restaurants that seem like the most obvious choices. Otherwise, I’ve put out calls. Any kind of match through VICAP will take time.” The federal database was a godsend to local law enforcement. Unfortunately, it had limitations; many small jurisdictions didn’t input crimes.
Trina nodded.
“I’ve already talked to Amy Owen’s parents. They still live here, only a few blocks from where I grew up in the old town.”
“She hadn’t married, then?”
“Married and divorced. The ex is next on my list.”
“He’s around?”
The lieutenant consulted her notes. “Doug Jennings. He’s a ski bum, according to the parents. Amy wanted to think about buying a house, starting a family. He wasn’t interested.”
“So the divorce wasn’t ugly?” From what she’d read, Trina was willing to bet this killer and Amy had been strangers, anyway, but you had to consider all possibilities.
“Not according to them. They say he’ll be broken up to hear about her murder. I went by his place and he wasn’t home.” Meg Patton rose. “What say we go talk to him now, then take a look at her apartment.”
“Am I going to stay on the case, then?” Trina asked, rising, too.
The lieutenant looked surprised. “I tagged you, didn’t I?”
This didn’t seem the moment to ask why. “Thank you, ma…um, Lieutenant.”
Exhilaration wiped out her weariness. Her mind buzzed. She’d want to read the file on the six-year-old murder. Look for details that were the same—and ones that were different. Talk to whoever found that body. The cops who worked the murder. If this one was as similar as Lieutenant Patton claimed, this killer had to be close in some way to the previous crime. Copycats had a motive. What was this one’s?
Wow, she thought, feeling giddy. I’m a detective. A real detective.
Not even missing the cup of coffee she hadn’t yet poured, she followed Lieutenant Patton out.
CHAPTER TWO
WILL’S RESOLVE to move home to Elk Springs wavered from time to time. Pretty well daily, in fact. Tonight was a definite plunge in the Mood-O-Meter.
He was staying at his father’s while he looked for a place to live. Their relationship was pleasant but cool, thanks to Will’s long-held belief that his parents in their professional capacities were responsible for the scum who’d killed Gillian being out on the street and therefore free to rape and mutilate. If they’d done their jobs…
But they hadn’t, for reasons he understood intellectually if not emotionally. Now, six years later, he also understood that his anger had mostly been misplaced. But things once said couldn’t be taken back, and much as he regretted the fact, Will knew he couldn’t have back what he’d lost that night.
This week, his father was away at a conference for sheriffs and police chiefs. With him gone, Will was able to relax a little. He got along well with Beth, his dad’s wife, and with her kids.
Stephanie was a senior in high school this year, a really smart girl who had applied to private colleges like Whitman and even Vassar back east. Pretty, with her mother’s dark hair and blue eyes, she was the same serious kid she’d been when her mother married Jack Murray, Sheriff of Butte County.
Redheaded Lauren, fourteen, was in contrast currently grounded because she’d been caught cutting classes. She was a cheerleader and, according to her mother, a social butterfly who was a teenager with a capital T. Will could see what she meant. Lauren was all giggles and glow one minute, sulky the next. He sympathized, since he remembered his own teenage angst when his mom and he moved to Elk Springs so he could finally get to know his father. One minute, he’d believed he could clear Juanita Butte in a single bound, and the next he’d been sure his mother was trying to ruin his life.
So far, both girls seemed pleased to have their stepbrother around.
He’d been okay earlier, watching a TV movie with Steph and explaining to her why the whole trial scene was crap. Lauren had wandered in once, curled her lip, said, “That looks boring,” and gone off to instant message with the friends she was banned from seeing out of school until next Wednesday. “An eternity,” she’d moaned at dinner, after Beth had declined to release her from purgatory.
But after the movie, when Steph disappeared to her room and Beth went to the den to work on orders for her stationery business, Will sat in the empty living room and thought, What am I doing? I must be nuts.
The room, the house, got to him. He’d helped his dad strip these floors and the woodwork and then stain and refinish them. They’d both learned as they went, repairing plaster walls, painting, plumbing, even rewiring. Maybe because he’d been without a father for the first fourteen years of his life, Will had been more eager to spend time with his than most of his buddies were. Now this big old Queen Anne style house made him edgy. Aware of times past, of lost trust and easy affection.
The house was part of his history with Gillian, too. She’d spent weekends and school breaks here with him. They’d had incredible talks right here in the living room, made passionate love upstairs in his bedroom. They’d had that last fight in his bedroom, too, one that had been quiet but intense until she’d walked out on him. He’d run after her and, not caring who heard, stood on the porch and yelled, “Go! I don’t give a shit!”
But he’d given a shit when the cops were on his dad’s doorstep the next morning to inform him that his girlfriend had been found raped and strangled in Deschutes Park. He’d given a shit when they politely and inexorably questioned his whereabouts during the night even as his gut roiled with disbelief and horror and guilt, because he’d let Gilly stalk out without trying to stop her.
From where he sat right now, in a leather club chair, he could see the entry. Empty, but for ghosts. A rangy, carefree version of himself with Dad, scraping thick layers of varnish from the stair banister. He and Gilly, tiptoeing in after going out with some of his high school friends, stifling giggles, pausing to make out just inside the front door, two or three times on the staircase, barely getting the bedroom door shut before shedding their clothes. A slightly older Gillian screaming, “We’re done! Over!” before she flung open the front door to leave. Two officers wearing the familiar Butte County Sheriff’s Department green, saying, “I’m sorry to inform you…”
He groaned and laid his head back, his eyes closed. He didn’t even know why he felt compelled to leave cosmopolitan Portland for this small town that held so many complex memories. He loved Elk Springs, but he hated it, too.
Even for himself, the best explanation he could come up with for accepting the job in the Butte County prosecutor’s office was that he needed answers. Closure. Understanding.
He had an uneasy relationship with both his parents, although Gilly and his accusations had gone un-mentioned on all sides for five years or more. Mad because he’d hurt his mom, his aunt Abby hardly spoke to him, he didn’t know his own half-brother and -sister the way he should, and the stories about his grandfather Patton had begun to seem apocryphal. Had he been anywhere near as bad as they said? Even if he was, did that justify both Meg Patton and Jack Murray being so soft on a troubled young kid that they let him slide out of taking responsibility for one crime after another?
And Gilly… Why hadn’t she just driven back to Salem? Why did she have to go to a bar? Was she getting in her car with the intention of returning here, maybe to say, “I’m sorry,” when a hand closed over her mouth from behind? Had she thought Will might still come after her? Somehow save her?
Still caught in that hazy nexus of past and present, he wondered with a dull ache why he hadn’t gone after her. Her parents grieved to this day. They claimed not to blame him, but they must.
He blamed himself.
The doorbell rang, and he jerked, his eyes opening. Who in hell at this time of night?
Eyes wide with instinctive alarm, Beth emerged from the home office at the back of the house, but Will, who had reached the front hall before her, said, “Let me find out who it is.”
Through the peephole he saw the dark green of sheriff’s department uniforms. His sense of disorientation returned. Gillian?
But when he opened the door, it was his mother he found on the porch, along with another officer. A young woman who appeared vaguely familiar.
“Mom?”
Her face looked drawn, her eyes tired. “Will, I need to talk to you.”
He backed up. Cold air rushed in with them. Or maybe the chill was inside him.
“Hi, Beth.” Mom tried to smile.
“Meg.” Beth pressed a hand to her breast. “Is everything all right? It’s not Jack?”
“No, no. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. No, everybody in the family is fine.”
But somebody, Will diagnosed, wasn’t fine. Somebody Will knew, or she wouldn’t be here.
The wife of a cop, Beth knew, too. She looked Will’s mother over with an experienced eye. “Can I get you coffee? Better yet, a bite to eat? I’ll bet you haven’t stopped, have you?”
“I’m fine…” Meg stopped. She gave a faint laugh. “Actually, I’m starved. A snack would be great, if it isn’t too much trouble.”
“Don’t be silly.” Beth shooed them towards the living room. “Coming right up.”
His mother pulled off her gloves, then began to shrug out of her coat. He took it and the other cop’s, too, and hung them on the tree near the front door.
He took a few steps into the living room, then stopped. “What’s up?”
“Detective Giallombardo, this is my son Will. Will, Trina Giallombardo. You may remember her from school.”
“You look familiar,” he admitted.
“I was a couple of years behind you.”
That would explain it. By his junior and senior years, he and his friends hadn’t been interested in lower classmen. Maybe a really hot girl. This Trina hadn’t been that. So he’d probably passed her in the hall without ever really focusing on her face.
“Detective Giallombardo,” he acknowledged, then faced his mother. “Tell me.”
“A girl you dated in high school was found murdered today.”
A sound escaped him. A profanity, maybe. He reached out and gripped the back of the leather chair.
“Who?”
“Amy Owen.”
He’d expected… He didn’t know who he’d expected. But not Amy.
“We only went out three or four times.”
“That’s what Detective Giallombardo thought.”
This woman he didn’t know, who had been two years behind him in school, was suddenly an expert on his life?
“You’re well-informed.”
Her returning gaze was expressionless. “You were the big guy in school. People talked.”
His irritation vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “Amy. My God.”
“Sit,” his mother ordered.
“Here’s coffee,” Beth said behind him.
He sank into the chair, soul-sick. On the job, he dealt in murder often, but not the murder of people he knew. Only with Gillian had he experienced firsthand the horror and grief family and friends felt.
Amy Owen, pretty, not smart but sweet.
“I saw her last week,” he said.
“What?” Hand outstretched for a cup of coffee she hadn’t yet picked up from the tray, his mother turned.
“I saw her.” Jeez, he wished he hadn’t. He wished Amy Owen was no more than a hazy memory. “She was at J.R.’s when I went there with Gavin and Travis.” No surprise—the sports bar was a favorite hangout for locals. “She was with Jody Cox. Remember her? And a friend of hers, a newcomer.”
“Another woman?”
He saw what she was getting at. “Yeah, a woman. Karin. Don’t remember the last name. I have her phone number if you want it.”
Will saw a fleeting expression of…something cross Trina Giallombardo’s face. Another time he might have wondered at it. Right now, he was too wrapped up in the image of Amy jumping from the bar stool to wave at him.
“Will! Will! Over here. Wow! Hi!”
He guessed he’d flirted with her a little bit, because she’d been flirting with him, but it was her friend’s phone number he’d quietly asked for before the women announced they were calling it a night.
His mother sat on the couch facing him. “Did she tell you she’s divorced?”
“Yeah. Actually, her ex came in, too. Didn’t look real happy to see her with a bunch of guys.”
“Did he say anything?”
Will shook his head. “That’s just my impression. He came over and she introduced him. He was polite.”
“Was he with anyone?”
“Not that I saw.” His mother was interrogating him, he realized. She’d even flipped her notebook open. The coffee and toasted sandwiches Beth had made sat untouched on the table.
Her gaze was sharp on him. He could see her brain humming. “Did he stay around?”
“Uh…I don’t really know.” He frowned. “Wait. I did see him a little later. Maybe half an hour.” Appalled, he said, “You don’t think…”
“We don’t think anything yet. No, he’s unlikely. This didn’t look like a crime of passion. Someone who’d loved her, however angry he was, would have felt remorse, regret. Treated her body with more respect.”
“Was it a bad one?” Will asked quietly.
His mother looked older than she had since—damn, since he’d aged her with his accusations and wild rage.
“Yeah. Will…”
He wasn’t going to like what was coming. Aware of both women watching him, he braced himself and waited.
“We have a copycat. Will, this looked like Gillian’s murder.”
He lurched to his feet. “What do you mean?”
She rose, too. “I mean it could have been the same killer. The body was left in the same condition.”
An image of Gilly’s body flashed before his eyes. Through gritted teeth, he asked, “Was she raped?”
His mother’s expression was compassionate. “Yes.”
In some part of his mind, he noted that Trina Giallombardo’s dark eyes were only watchful. If she felt pity, suspicion, dislike, sympathy, she didn’t show it.
“Strangled with a jockstrap?”
“Yes.”
He wheeled away to stand with his back to the women. He was panting as if he’d sprinted the last half mile of his daily run. Sweating. Sick. Gilly, oh Gilly. The women’s faces overlay like a double exposure, both blond and fine-boned. Not Gilly, he thought. Not this time. Instead, some sick son of a bitch had raped and tortured pretty, sweet Amy Owen, then left her body as if she were a whore. Garbage.
“Who?” he asked, voice guttural.
His mother sounded grim. “We’ll find out.”
“Was she in the same place?”
“No.” Gillian’s body had been left right in town, among the willow trees in the town park on the bank of the Deschutes River. “Amy was left at the lava cone past the Triple B. A couple of kids found her.”
He turned to face them all of them, Beth in the background. “Why are you here?”
His mother’s expression changed. “What?”
“Is my name going to come up?”
She gaped. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
“Yeah? Why not? I’d be a logical suspect, wouldn’t I?”
Her mouth opened and closed like a fish’s. He was glad to have disconcerted her for once, put her on the defensive.
Detective Giallombardo said, “Your mother didn’t want you to read about it in the morning paper. She thought the news would be better coming from her.”
Shame flooded him, as she’d intended. Will swore and scraped a hand over his face.
“I’m sorry, Mom. God. I’m sorry.”
His mother gave a twisted smile. “It’s okay. Of course you’re upset.”
He saw in her eyes that he’d hurt her. As, he realized, he’d intended. And he didn’t even know why he’d lashed out.
“Mendoza…” He hated the taste of the bastard’s name in his mouth.
“Is still at Salem.” The Oregon State Penitentiary was in Salem, Oregon’s capital.
“A friend of his…”
“That’s a possibility we’ll pursue.”
“But not a very good one.”
She didn’t have to answer. Of course, it was unlikely one of Ricardo Mendoza’s friends would commit a crime this savage, and why? What was the motive?
For the first time, Will was thinking like the attorney and prosecutor he was.
“What’s the point? What’s this scum trying to say?”
“I have no idea,” his mother admitted. “Maybe nothing. Maybe this guy just liked the idea. Thought wiping out her identity, metaphorically, by replacing it with a crude symbol of masculinity was funny.”
“Like he’s saying, ‘In your face’?” Will asked.
She spread her hands. “Maybe he thought a jockstrap sounded like a handy murder weapon. Hard to trace, wouldn’t hold fingerprints well, and, hey, you could carry it around in your pocket without exciting suspicion. You’re on your way to the gym. What’s the big deal?”
“Have you ever before or since read or heard of a woman strangled with a jockstrap?” he asked.
“No,” she conceded.
“Here we are. Small town. Not all that many murders, and ninety-nine percent of those are your garden-variety shoot-the-abusive-husband type. Biker brawls. Not the work of serial killers.”
They’d speculated back then that Gillian’s murder was too “sophisticated” to be a killer’s first. The savagery coupled with the care taken displaying the body, had seemed to be the work of someone who’d done this before. On the other hand, Mendoza had also done unbelievably stupid things: he was seen leaving the bar with Gilly, his skin was beneath her fingernails and his semen was found in her body. Evidence of grandiosity and disorganized thinking, everyone said. He’d felt invincible, never thought he’d be suspected. So what if he’d talked to Gillian in the bar? She’d talked to other men, too. Maybe he hadn’t realized anyone at the bar could name him. It didn’t matter—he’d been convicted on DNA.
“So what are the odds that, just coincidentally, we have a second killer with the same idea?”
She didn’t have to answer.
“Are you going to talk to Mendoza?”
“Maybe. We’ll concentrate on her movements yesterday first.”
“She told me where she worked.” But, damn, he couldn’t remember.
“She was a hairstylist. She had a chair at Mountain High Salon.”
Beth made a sound. They all turned.
“Was she tall and blond? With a mole on her cheek?” She looked from one of them to another. Pressed her hands to her cheeks. “Oh, no! She cut my hair the last time. And Steph’s been going to her. I should have recognized the name! I hate to tell Steph. Oh, that poor girl.”
“I’m sorry,” his mother said, uselessly.
“Does Jack know yet?”
“No. He hasn’t called, and I figured there’s nothing he could do, not tonight. I’ll page him in the morning.”
Will’s mother and Detective Giallombardo ate then, both gobbling as if they couldn’t remember their last meal. He knew from experience that his mother would be lucky to snatch a few hours of sleep tonight. She’d spend tomorrow talking to everyone who’d know anything about Amy’s last day. Meg Patton was dedicated. Just…sometimes soft, in his opinion. Wanting to do the opposite of whatever her bastard of a father would have done. She and Aunt Renee both had seemed to spend their careers trying to bury their father’s legacy as Elk Springs police chief.
The two women left, Will’s mom promising to keep him informed. Then, he and Beth rehashed what they knew, Beth clearly upset.
“That poor, poor girl,” she kept saying. “She was your age?”
“A year younger.”
“Twenty-eight, then. Only twenty-eight.”
He finally persuaded her to go to bed, in part by heading for his own. With the house quiet and dark, only his bedside lamp on, Will sat up against a heap of pillows and tried to read, but kept finishing the same page without remembering a word.
He was tired, but at the same time wide awake. Antsy. Feeling as if he should do something. Fight or flight. Will recognized that he was in shock, reliving the hours after Gilly’s body was found, when a thousand, if onlys and I should haves had run crazily through his mind as if he were on crack. Replay, replay. Change the ending. He’d kept trying, over and over, until he was crazy and slammed his fist into the wall. He hadn’t even noticed he’d broken bones for a while, the pain nothing, nothing, compared to the agony in his chest.
His book fell to the bedcovers, forgotten. He couldn’t shut out the memories, the horror.
Amy, face alight when she saw him, waving in delight. “Will! Over here!” Gilly laughing up at him, staring at him with hate that in his imaginings became terror. Her face, Amy’s face, one and the same.
Pulling himself back from the abyss, Will tried to remember how well Gilly and Amy knew each other. They hadn’t become friends—nothing like that, but Amy was certainly part of the crowd he’d introduced Gilly to. They had looked a little bit alike. Both five-eight or -nine, leggy, boyishly slim, naturally blond. Neither blue-eyed. Gillian had had pale, almost sea-green eyes, Amy… He couldn’t quite picture them. Brown? He flashed on Trina Giallombardo’s brown eyes, assessing, accusing, judging, because he’d lost it with his mother. Angry at her intrusion, he shook his head and returned doggedly to his struggle to see Amy Owen. No. Not brown. Flecks of yellow and green.
Dead. Because, like Gillian, she was tall and blond and willowy? But their killers weren’t the same man. Couldn’t be the same man. Mendoza was guilty, guilty, guilty. Scum who had no business hitting on Will’s girlfriend in the bar, becoming enraged because she’d rejected him, raping, murdering, taunting.
Had Amy been chosen precisely because she looked like Gillian? A copycat crime required a copycat victim. But who in hell would imitate something like this? Could Elk Springs really have spawned two monsters? Copycat monsters?
It made no sense. None of it made sense. Gilly’s murder by a man who’d hot-wired cars and fenced stolen goods but never committed a violent crime. This one now, six years later. Why six years? Why now?
Why two women Will had known? A stranger, killed exactly like Gillian, would have been bad enough, but Amy! Less than a week after they met again, talked about old times, flirted a little.
He went cold. Was that why she’d been chosen? Because he knew her? Because he’d flirted with her? Because, like Gilly, she’d once meant something to him?
But that made no sense either. He’d dated her a few times. Kissed her. Had sex with her once—after they’d both had too much to drink at a party. So what? He’d dated and kissed a dozen girls or more in high school. Slept with several. Had a couple of girlfriends who lasted months. One nearly a year. He knew Nita and Christine both were still around. Why not one of them? Why Amy? Opportunity? Just because in a small town there were only so many look-alike blondes?
Why? God, why? he begged, even as he knew he’d get no answer.
CHAPTER THREE
LIEUTENANT PATTON HAD somehow kept word of the murder out of the morning papers, but they all knew it would be on the five o’clock local news.
The downside was that Trina had to be the one to tell many of Amy Owen’s friends and co-workers about her death. The task was made worse by the fact that Amy was apparently liked by everyone. No secret delight, no affected shock.
This particular friend, a plump, freckled redhead, turned milk-pale. “Dead?”
Seeing her sway, Trina said, “Please. Sit down.”
“Murdered?”
Gently taking her upper arm, Trina backed her up to the couch and pushed. Marcie Whittaker never took her stunned gaze from Trina’s face.
“How can she be?”
How did you answer that kind of question? It implied that there was a rational order, a why for every action, a series of logical consequences. It suggested that if you took to heart all of your parents’ warnings, you’d be safe, loved, prosperous. Trina had been a cop long enough to know that things didn’t work that way.
She and Lieutenant Patton had divided up names. Amy had had dozens of friends. After talking with the crew at the beauty salon, they’d each taken a list and started contacting anyone who might have spoken with Amy in the days leading up to her death, or who might have been with her yesterday. Since her vehicle had not yet been located, finding out where she might have gone that night was critical.
Trina remembered Marcie from high school. She and Amy had been part of a pack of popular girls—cheerleaders, homecoming princesses, stars of the spring musicals. As remote from Trina’s world as Will Patton had been. They’d walked down the hall in groups of three or four, laughing and tossing their long, shining hair, their clothes always perfect, their complexions glowing from a weekend on the ski hill. Money was never a problem for any of the popular kids, Trina had believed then.
In the intervening years, Marcie had put on weight. She’d gotten married right out of high school and had two school-age children as well as a toddler. Trina had expected a fancy house and found her instead in a modest rambler on a street of mostly rentals. Marcie had invited her in with surprise and said, “My youngest is down for a nap. You want to talk about Amy? Why?”
Now, in answer to the unanswerable, Trina said, “Amy may just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s what we’re trying to determine.”
“Was she…”
“Raped?”
Marcie bit her lip and nodded.
“Yes, I’m afraid so.” They’d decided to admit that much.
“Oh God, oh God.”
“Did you speak to Amy in the last couple of weeks?”
Tears oozed from Marcie’s eyes. She nodded. “Excuse me. I need to—” She leapt to her feet and bolted from the room.
Trina used the time to study the framed photos on the mantel. Most were presumably of Marcie’s children, redheads all like their mother. Trina recognized the man who appeared in many only because Marcie had taken the last name Whittaker. In high school, Dirk Whittaker had been one of the swaggering jocks, a state All-Star tackle. Like a lot of brawny guys, he’d put on serious weight in the ten years since he’d graduated.
What interested her most was that, displayed with the family photos, there were three framed snapshots, probably taken at several year intervals, of Marcie with her old crowd, including Amy Owen. In the first, all were recognizably the same people they’d been in high school—still slim, stylish, confident. By the next photo chronologically, although all were posing jauntily and laughing, some of the crowd had changed: begun to put on weight, quit expending so much effort on their appearances. Perhaps half were still sleek and beautiful. By the most recent photograph, the distinction was obvious. Some, like Amy, still looked beautiful, privileged and entitled, while others in the crowd showed the toll taken by jobs that didn’t allow for hours at the gym, by scrimping financially, by the exhaustion of raising children.
Will Patton was in the middle photo. A young woman Trina didn’t recognize stood within the circle of his arm. She bore a superficial resemblance to Amy: she was also tall, although dwarfed by his height, and her hair was the silvery shade of ash-blond that had to be natural. Amy was prettier in a conventional way; the woman with him had a distinct bump on the bridge of her nose, ears that poked out a little, and a catlike slant to her eyes that gave her the look of an elf. Maybe not beautiful, hers was still the kind of face you didn’t forget.
Trina suspected that the fine-boned, moonlight-pale girl gazing up at Will Patton rather than at the camera was Gillian Pappas, the victim of the original murder. Her gaze lingering on the couple, Trina felt an odd squeezing in her chest she wanted to believe was pity but she knew was more complex.
“Those are my kids,” Marcie said dully from behind her.
“What a cute little girl,” Trina felt obligated to say.
Marcie came to stand beside her. “Amy is in some of these.” She picked up the most recent, framed in silver. “Right there.”
No Will in this photo. Trina wondered if he’d quit coming home, quit hanging out with his old friends. No, not entirely, because he’d been at J.R.’s with a couple of them.
“You stayed close friends, then.”
Although Marcie had given no indication of recognizing Trina, she seemed to assume that everyone knew she and Marcie were best friends. “Well, naturally. We didn’t spend as much time together, of course. I mean, I’m married and have kids. But we talked a couple of times a week and had lunch every week or two. She didn’t mind if I brought Vicki. Amy wanted kids.” Hit by the knowledge that Amy would never have a baby, Marcie began to cry again. Silently, with bewilderment.
Trina opened her notebook. “Had she mentioned anyone following her, some guy making her nervous? Anything like that?”
“No, I’m sure she didn’t.”
“Was she seeing a man?”
“She went out. But not with anyone special. She got divorced just last spring, you know.”
“Are you aware of her dating in the past few weeks?”
Marcie named a couple of men. “Plus she was hoping this guy we knew in high school would call her. Will Patton.”
Trina’s fingers tightened on her pencil. “Had he called, to your knowledge?”
Marcie shook her head, eyes wet. “Amy would have been on the phone instantly if he had. She had this huge crush on him. I mean, she always did. She said she saw him last week, that he’s moved back to Elk Springs.”
“Was there anyone who might have felt jealous if he could tell how she felt about Mr. Patton?”
“Felt jealous? Oh. Like, did she blow some guy off so she could concentrate on Will?” Marcie shook her head again. “Like I said, she’d see men, but it was casual. The only one who might be jealous was her ex, but he had his chance.”
Interested in her spiteful tone, Trina asked about the victim’s relationship with her ex-husband.
“I think he wanted her back. But he still didn’t intend to really settle down. You know? He’s this big outdoors guy. He wants to ski all winter and mountain climb all summer. He works up at Juanita Butte in the winter, but he never even looked for a job in the summer. He got mad when she had to work. Plus, she didn’t like to climb.”
“Her parents described the breakup as amiable.”
“It was.” Marcie shrugged. “But he kept coming around. She slipped a couple of times and had sex with him, which was dumb.”
“Did she have other sexual relationships?”
“You mean, did she screw guys? Sure.” Marcie sounded surprised, as if a single woman being sexually active was a given.
No, there was more to her tone, Trina suspected; she was just a little envious. Married almost ten years, with three kids, she probably lived vicariously through Amy’s tales.
“Anyone in particular?”
“Um…” Marcie thought. “Adrian Benson. She told me the other day he wasn’t that good in bed, even though he’s hot.”
Benson was one of the men she’d said earlier that Marcie might have dated in the previous week or two. Trina starred his name. He wasn’t anyone she recalled from high school.
“If she met a man over drinks and liked him, would she be likely to leave with him?”
“Yeah, why not?” The moment the words were out, Marcie’s mouth formed an O. Amy Owen had very likely paid an extreme penalty for trusting a dangerous man.
Trina steered her gently back to the final day. Yes, she’d talked briefly to Amy midafternoon. “I told her I’d try to get a babysitter Saturday night so Dirk and I could go out.”
Trina already knew that Amy had worked yesterday, leaving the salon about four. “Did she mention plans for yesterday evening?”
“She said she was bored and might go get a drink. She didn’t say where or if she was going with a friend.”
Trina wrote down Amy’s favorite hangouts and then thanked Marcie. Handing her a card, she said, “Please call if you think of anything at all that you think we should know.”
The next friend of Amy’s on Trina’s list actually recognized her.
Bronwen Fessler had started a clothing boutique in town that Trina had heard was very successful. Daddy Fessler was a banker and had had plenty of money to bankroll her.
The clothes in the window were bold and bright-colored. Stuff that shouldn’t have gone together somehow did, like a hot-pink cashmere turtleneck and lime-green wool slacks. Maybe, Trina decided, studying the display carefully, the skinny loomed scarf worn as a belt accomplished the magic. Personally, she might have bought all three pieces and never in a million years considered putting them together.
Which, she guessed, was why she was a cop and not a fashion designer or owner of a boutique. And why everything she wore was boring.
She pushed open the door, making the bell that hung above it tinkle. Bronwen Fessler hadn’t changed much, just become more stylish. A petite brunette with short, artfully tousled hair, she sat on a high stool behind a glass case that held jewelry and on top of which was the cash register. She appeared to be attaching labels to chunky bracelets laid out on the glass top in front of her. Through the window Trina hadn’t noticed the two women browsing sweaters displayed in cubes on the back wall.
Bronwen glanced up with a practiced smile that she aborted. “Officer…” she began in surprise, then, “Wait. I know you, don’t I? From school. No, don’t tell me. Something like Teresa.”
“Trina. Trina Giallombardo.”
“Right.” She seemed pleased by her memory rather than by Trina’s appearance. “You’re a police officer, huh?”
“A detective.” Being able to say that still gave Trina a thrill. “I’m here to speak to you about a friend of yours.”
“A friend of mine?”
“Um, excuse me,” one of the women interrupted. “I’d like to try this on.”
“Certainly,” Bronwen told her. To Trina, she asked, “Can you wait a minute?”
“No problem.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she watched as Bronwen Fessler charmed and flattered the two customers, who looked about forty but were probably older. There was nothing like being loaded to help a woman keep her looks. These two had perfectly dyed and coiffed hair, suspiciously smooth faces, skillfully applied makeup and carefully tended figures. In the end, one bought two sweaters and the other a necklace, all for prices that made Trina gape.
Staring after them, she exclaimed, “Did she just pay almost seven hundred dollars for two sweaters?”
“And they were on sale. Sweetie, people do, you know.”
Not people in Trina’s circles.
“Wow,” she said, then flushed.
“I take it you dress from J.C. Penney?” Bronwen said with amused disdain.
“More like Eddie Bauer.”
“Jeans and flannel shirts?” Her practiced eye swept from Trina’s well-polished but sturdy black shoes to her unpierced ears. “Come in sometime when you’re off-duty and I may convert you. For old times’ sake, I’ll allow you an employee discount. The first time you come.”
Old times’ sake? Trina doubted they’d ever exchanged a word. She thought they might have been in a class or two together; she’d been advanced enough in math to often be in classes with students a year or two ahead of her.
Glancing at a mannequin dressed in a beaded bustier and a pouffy black skirt, she was tempted, though. Maybe the right clothes could accomplish magic. She could probably afford them if she wanted them….
Yeah. Sure they would. And why do you want to be transformed? she mocked herself. So that you catch Will Patton’s eyes?
Uh-huh. That was going to happen. Like he ever dated a woman who wore bigger than a size four and wasn’t blond.
“Thank you for the offer,” she said formally. “But I’m here in my official capacity today.”
“Right. I forgot. You wanted to ask me about a friend.” Her tone became flip. “Do I know someone who’s held up the bank?”
“I understand you’ve remained friends with Amy Owen.”
“Well, sure.” She laughed. “Amy’s not the bank robber type.”
“I regret to tell you that she’s dead. She was murdered last night.”
Bronwen stared at her with a complete lack of comprehension. “She can’t be dead. I saw her last night. We had a drink.” She reached for the telephone. “I’ll call her. There must be a mistake.”
Trina shook her head. “Her parents have identified her.”
“If they were upset…”
Voice gentle, she said, “I saw her body. I recognized her.”
“But…” She seemed to deflate, her vivacity gone, her face five years older. “Did somebody break in, or…”
“We don’t know yet. We haven’t found her car. That’s why we’re talking to her friends.” Trina opened her notebook, hoping if she kept Bronwen talking to avert tears. “Had you made plans in advance to get together?”
Bronwen took a deep breath and straightened. “She called at about…oh, I don’t know, six o’clock? I had some bookkeeping to do, but Amy said she was bored and pleaded with me. I met her at the Timberline. She wasn’t hungry, but I had chicken wings and we both had a drink.”
“Did she have something she urgently wanted to tell you?”
Bronwen shook her head. “We just chatted. She seemed restless. She was bummed because this guy hasn’t called her.”
“Will Patton?”
“How did you know? Oh. I get it. You’ve already talked to other people. Yeah, Will. Otherwise, I talked about what I’m buying for spring for the store and she bitched about her ex because he won’t leave her alone. She thinks…” Bronwen’s voice stumbled. “She thought her parents were sympathetic to him, which annoyed her.”
“What was he doing to annoy her?”
“Not what you’re thinking! Doug is an okay guy. He’s just been regretting the divorce. He wouldn’t get violent.” She said it as if the idea was absurd, unthinkable.
“But somebody did.”
Bronwen’s fingers twisted together. “God. How was she killed?”
“We’ll know more after the autopsy. It appears she was strangled.”
“Was she raped?”
“Yes.”
“Doug wouldn’t have raped her,” she said with certainty. “She admitted to me that she let him spend the night not that long ago. He didn’t have to rape her.”
“Rape is only peripherally about sex. It has more to do with control and power.”
She kept shaking her head. “Not Doug.”
Trina didn’t really believe that the ex-husband would prove to be a serious suspect. This murder didn’t have the hallmarks of domestic violence. But it was also possible that they were dealing with a killer who had strangled Amy in a fit of rage, then remembered the murder from six years ago and decided to imitate it to throw the police off. An impulse killer who was also able to keep his cool. Not common, but conceivable.
“Is Doug a friend of yours, too?” Trina asked.
“Mine? Heavens, no! Like I said, he’s a nice guy. But honestly, he’s not that bright. Just kind of big and dumb and fun-loving. Not my type.”
No, Doug sounded like a lousy prospect to have kept his cool and used his head.
Trina determined that Bronwen and Amy had parted in the parking lot at just after eight.
“Do you think she might have gone back in?”
“No, we were parked next to each other and she pulled out of the lot right behind me. I had to get some work done, and I assumed she was going home even though she still seemed…I don’t know.” She visibly groped for a word and settled for the same one she’d used earlier. “Restless. Maybe a little unhappy. Not in the mood to go home and watch reruns and sip cocoa.”
She suggested other brewhouses and pubs where they might show Amy’s picture, other friends Amy might have called.
“Guys? Wow. Adrian Benson. Maybe. She was getting bored with him. I mean, they didn’t have that much of a thing, and she was losing interest, but just for something to do… Um, Travis Booth. They were sorta friends, sorta something more.”
“Travis.” Wasn’t he one of the friends Will Patton had mentioned being with the evening he ran into Amy at J.R.’s? “I remember him. He was a friend of Will Patton’s.”
“Right. Only he didn’t do high school sports because he ski-raced. He actually made the U.S. ski team, but then he was hurt really badly training for the downhill.”
“Yeah, yeah, I remember.” Like most guys that age, Will had run in a pack. His buddies were jocks, but the smart ones. Most had gone on to college after they graduated. “I didn’t realize he was still in Elk Springs.”
“He’s head of the ski school at Juanita Butte. But he’s getting some success as an artist, too. Don’t you read your newspaper? They did a feature on him—I don’t know—a month or so ago.” Her voice changed, relaxed fractionally as she reminisced. “He used to draw really wicked caricatures. He did this fantastic one of Mr. Jones, only one of the teachers snagged it when it was being passed around, and he ended up in detention for a week.”
Mr. Jones, then high school principal and not a popular one, had been ripe for caricature with his double chins and beady eyes.
Trina forced herself back to more relevant subjects. Travis Booth, for one. He’d seen Amy fall anew for Will Patton, maybe resented it. Trina starred his name, too.
She flipped back through her notes. “Do you know a Gavin, who seems to be a friend of Travis’s?”
Bronwen pursed her lips. “Gavin. You mean Huseby? He kind of hung around Will. I never paid any attention to him. I know he’s around again.”
Bronwen supplied a few new names of people in Amy’s circle. At the end, she asked, “Do you think this guy killed Amy in particular? Or was she just…”
“Convenient?”
“That sounds awful, but…” She fidgeted. “Yeah. I mean, should single women be scared?”
“At this point, we simply don’t know the motive. It wouldn’t hurt to use extra caution.”
“Okay.” Bronwen gave a wry smile. “Thanks, Trina. Wow. Business is slow, anyway. Maybe I’ll close. Or maybe not.” She shivered. “I don’t want to go home alone. I could call around. Some of us could get together and have a kind of wake.”
“That might help all of you.” Trina nodded. “I appreciate your assistance.”
She was at the door when Bronwen called, “Trina? That employee discount? I meant it, you know. Come back someday.”
“I just might.” Trina nodded and left, the bell tinkling as she let the door shut behind her.
She started her Explorer to get the heat cranking, but didn’t pull away from the curb immediately. Instead, she thought about Amy Owen as her friends described her.
On the surface, a party girl. An easy victim, because she’d bar-hopped, lowered her guard by drinking and been sexually promiscuous enough to end her evening with any man who appealed. Yet, it was clear from what her parents, Marcie and Bronwen had said that Amy wanted something different. That she was filling time until she found the white-picket-fence ending she craved. As much as she liked to party, she also possessed a quality of sweetness that drew people. She had a huge circle of friends. Trina had two best friends, a couple more casual ones and a few other people who might invite her to Christmas gatherings. She thought she was more the norm than Amy Owen.
An amazing number of those friendships dated from high school. In fact, it seemed every conversation today had twisted back to the halls of Elk Springs High School. Maybe that was natural in a small town. But given that they’d all graduated ten years ago, wouldn’t you think the group would include more newcomers, and that more of the high school crowd would have left town? The jocks were still the only desirable guys for the popular girls, who still clustered to flip their shiny hair and giggle at jokes no one else would get.
Not fair. Trina grimaced. They had lives. She was the one directing the conversations, asking them to dredge up memories.
Anyway, who was she to talk? She could have gone anywhere, but had chosen to come home to Elk Springs even though her childhood wasn’t what you’d call happy. And didn’t she still nurse a little bit of a crush on Will Patton, Homecoming King?
Besides—chances were none of this had anything whatsoever to do with Amy Owen’s murder. She’d likely been chosen at random, because she was available: sitting alone at a table in a pub or walking out to her car in a dark parking lot by herself. The odds, Trina thought, finally switching on her turn signal, were against Amy having been raped and murdered by a friend or even acquaintance.
BETH HAD GONE TO WORK, the girls to school. Will had intended to hunt for an apartment today. He wanted to buy, but was finding little for sale at this time of year. Absentee owners could rent by the week at astronomical rates. Spring, when the out-of-towners melted away with the snow, was when houses appeared on the market, according to the real estate agent who was helping him look.
The guy had called that morning. His income was probably zip at this time of year, and he was trying like hell to find something Will would buy.
When Will had walked into the real estate office last week, he’d been startled to recognize Jimmy McCartin from high school. The guy had been a hanger-on to Will’s group, too little and scrawny to play sports, but around all the time because he was manager for the football and baseball teams. Will hadn’t liked to crush the guy, but he never seemed to notice when he wasn’t welcome.
Heck, maybe that made him the salesman of the century. Successful real estate agents had to be damn pushy.
Jimmy was still scrawny and still able to make Will uncomfortable by doing things like slinging an arm around his shoulder when he introduced him to people and implying that they’d been best friends in high school.
“Hey,” he said. “Did you hear about Amy? I saw Travis this morning. He told me.”
Will had been hoping the caller was his mother with news.
After he and Jimmy hashed over the news for a couple of minutes, with Will pretending he didn’t know any more than anyone else did, McCartin asked, “Did you think any more about that house at Crescent Ridge? If you buy now, you could pick your own tile, paint colors, maybe upgrade some fixtures.”
The new development he was talking about was maybe half a mile from Will’s mother’s place, just off the mountain loop highway on the way up to Juanita Butte. The handful of houses that had been framed in so far were going to be beauties. Different builders were working there, which avoided the cookie-cutter effect, too. There was a shingled one at the top of the ridge that Will had liked.
“It’s just too big,” he said. “What was it, thirty-five hundred square feet? I don’t have any use for a place that size.”
“You could think about buying a lot and getting one custom built,” McCartin suggested.
“Yeah, but then I’d be looking at next fall before I had a place to live.” He got cream out of the refrigerator and poured some into his coffee, cell phone to his ear. “I don’t know. I’ll keep the house in mind, Jimmy, but I’m thinking I’ll wait a couple of months before I commit.”
“You know I’ll call you the minute I see any new listings,” McCartin assured him. “Hey, you planning to go to J.R.’s this weekend?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Will said, because he didn’t want to be rude.
“Great! I’ll see you there, then.”
Will shook his head as he hit End.
He hadn’t slept much last night, so at noon he was on his third cup of coffee and still trying to summon some motivation to get going. When the phone rang, he snatched it up.
“Pattons’ residence.”
“Will?” His father’s deep voice was unmistakable. “I just talked to Meg.”
“Are you coming home early?”
“I’m giving the keynote address at the banquet tomorrow night. I can’t. Besides, what can I do that your mother can’t?” Still, the growl in his voice betrayed his frustration. This was his county, his command. He wanted to be there, not exchanging tips of the trade with other law enforcement personnel in Seattle.
He wasn’t coming home early. Then what was this phone call about? Will waited.
“You know we’re going to have to consider the possibility that Mendoza was wrongly convicted.”
“Bullshit!” Will exploded. “You had DNA! How much more solid can you get?”
“We had proof he’d had intercourse with Gillian,” Jack Murray corrected. “In the absence of semen or hairs from another man, it was enough. But he’s been saying since the day we picked him up that he had sex with her, and that was all.”
“Bullshit!” Will said again. Intensely agitated, he paced the kitchen, wheeling each time he reached a wall. “Gilly wouldn’t have gone out and screwed some stranger! You knew her better than that.”
“What I know is that she was mad as hell. People do stupid things when they’re drunk, and her blood alcohol level was sky-high.” His voice softened. “She might have done it to punish you.”
The raging pain tore into Will’s gut, as it so often did. He stopped in his pacing and bent over as if he’d struck across the belly with a two-by-four.
Whatever Gilly had or hadn’t intended, he had been punished a thousand times over. But he couldn’t, wouldn’t, believe that Gilly would have been that careless with herself. That cruel to him.
“No,” he said. “No. He did it. He raped her and killed her.”
“Will…”
“Copycat crimes happen. We both know they do. What if he talked some buddy into it so he could walk?”
“Goddamn it, Will, you know we’ll consider every possibility. One of those possibilities is that we convicted the wrong man.”
“You’re back to defending him, aren’t you? Still can’t believe you could have been wrong about him? That he was using you?”
“That’s low.”
“Is it?” The phone creaked, he gripped it so hard. “Funny how fast you came to the conclusion that this murder clears Mendoza.”
“I didn’t say that—”
“The hell you didn’t.” He pushed End and slammed the phone onto the counter. Planting both hands there, he bent his head, teeth gritted. Fury and shame and renewed grief swelled in his chest until it hurt.
After a minute, breathing hard, he straightened. He’d been looking for motivation. Guess what. He’d just found it.
He grabbed his parka from the coat tree, checked to be sure he had his car keys, and left the house. If he had to rent a place that stank of cat urine, he’d do it.
Anything, to be out of here by the time his father got home on Sunday.
CHAPTER FOUR
TRINA AND Meg Patton, having failed to catch Doug Jennings at home, drove up to the Juanita Butte ski area on Saturday.
The lieutenant parked in the employee lot, taking a spot right by the slope of packed snow leading up to the lodge. Since her husband was the ski area general manager, she had reason to feel at home here.
Unlike Trina, who stepped out of the Explorer gingerly.
Despite frostbite-inducing cold, the lift lines were long, the slopes busy enough that skiers and boarders must be having to dodge each other. Never having learned to ski, Trina felt out of place here, which made her sulky and reminded her of her teenage resentment of the popular kids. But how could she help it? In contrast to all the tanned, long-legged, bleached-blond athletes heading for the lifts, she was pasty-skinned, dark-haired and compact.
She trailed ten feet behind Lieutenant Patton by the time they reached the A-frame that was, according to the lieutenant, the nerve center of the ski area. Ducking to save her skull from a snowboard carelessly swung by a teenage boy calling to friends above in the lift line, she slipped, knocked into a passing skier who yelled at her and finally righted herself at the foot of the snow-packed stairs leading up into the hut.
Naturally, the information center was staffed by a tanned, Nordic blond beauty.
“Oh, yeah! Doug’s wife! That was such a bummer. I mean, he’s going around with this tragic face.” She sounded awed at his suffering. More practically, she added, “His shift should be ending in a minute, anyway. I can call him down here.”
She got on the radio and his crackling voice agreed that he would rendezvous with the police officers at the ski school hut.
Stamping her feet and shivering, Trina thought about what Lieutenant Patton’s husband had said about Doug Jennings. Enthusiastic, great with the public, no apparent ambitions beyond the next ski season.
“Of course, Scott doesn’t know him well,” she’d added. “Unless the guy had been a major problem, a lift operator is a pretty small cog in Scott’s operation.”
Now, Lieutenant Patton also had the Nordic goddess call the ski school and ask for Travis Booth, Will’s friend who now headed the ski school. “If he could come down in, say, half an hour?”
Yet another crackling voice agreed.
Recognizable from photos in her apartment, Amy Owen’s ex-husband slid to a stop right by the door, as beautiful and Nordic as the goddess inside. Tapping the bindings with the tip of one of his poles, he stepped off the skis and set them inside.
His eyes were actually brown, despite the sun-bleached blond hair. Brown and puppy-dog-like and mournful. “You’re here about Amy?”
“Yes.” Lieutenant Patton nodded toward the lodge. “Can we go inside and talk?”
“Oh. Sure. I guess you’re cold?”
Despite heavy parkas and gloves, the lieutenant and Trina weren’t dressed for sub-zero weather. In just minutes, Trina had lost awareness of her face as a part of her body. When any of them talked, their breath froze in plumes that hung in the air. Trina wanted to say, Gee, you think?
Inside the busy lodge, they stamped snow from their boots. Meg Patton led the way upstairs to what appeared to be offices. A secretary smiled and said, “Scott said to give you the small conference room. Can I bring you coffee?”
“Please,” the lieutenant said.
If she’d turned it down, Trina would have whimpered. She was shivering and trying to hide it. Damn, she thought. Why hadn’t she taken a job somewhere warmer? She didn’t even like snow. The LAPD must have openings on a regular basis. Or maybe San Diego.
In the conference room, Doug Jennings dropped his gloves on the table, stripped off his snow-white hat with the cute pompom and peeled off his form-fitting parka. Very reluctantly, Trina divested herself of her outer layers. Gratefully seizing a mug of the coffee the secretary brought, she sat next to the lieutenant and opened her notebook.
Lieutenant Patton asked, “Mr. Jennings, when did you last see your ex-wife?”
His face crumpled, as if he were about to cry. “Wow. I can’t believe she’s dead. Amy was…” He swallowed. “Um. When did I see her the last time. Maybe Monday?” He pondered. “Yeah. Monday. I ran into her at Safeway. Kind of on purpose. See, I know she shops there, and she usually goes after work. So that’s when I shop.”
“But you are divorced.”
“Yeah, but…” He took a huge breath and let it out in a rush, his beseeching gaze moving from Lieutenant Patton’s to Trina’s and back. “I didn’t want to be! I love Amy! I shouldn’t have let her go.”
“And how did Ms. Owen feel about your pursuit?”
Expression ingenuous, he said, “I think she was coming around.” As if reading doubt on their faces, he added, “Really! We’ve actually kind of gotten together a couple of times lately. You know.”
They knew.
“Had you asked her to marry you again?”
“She said no, but not like she was mad or wanted me to leave her alone. More like…” He frowned. “Like she was teasing. I figured it was just a matter of time.”
“And the issues that led to the divorce in the first place?”
“I told her we could have a baby if she wanted. Kids are okay.”
Trina barely refrained from rolling her eyes at his magnanimity.
Lieutenant Patton’s voice changed. “Mr. Jennings, I have to ask where you were from Wednesday evening until Thursday morning.”
“Where I was?” He gaped at her, and Trina realized he really was naive enough not to have realized why he was being questioned in the first place. Bronwen was right; he was dumb. “You don’t think I…” Wildly searching their faces, he saw that they did indeed think the possibility existed that he had murdered his ex-wife. “I loved Amy!”
“Mr. Jennings, we’re obligated to rule out an ex-husband. If we can verify your whereabouts…”
He relaxed. “Oh, sure. Um…” More deep thinking. “I was here. I worked late shift on Wednesday evening. After the lifts shut down at ten, some of us stopped at the Timberline for drinks.”
The same place Amy had been earlier in the evening.
“You didn’t see Amy there?” Trina asked.
Both the lieutenant and Doug looked startled to hear her speak.
“No. It must have been close to eleven by the time we got there. She gets up early for work. She wouldn’t have still been out…” His Adam’s apple bobbed.
Hastily, before the moistness in his eyes could develop into a deluge, the lieutenant asked, “How late did you stay?”
He seemed to focus with an effort. “I don’t know. Until about one? Then Steve and I went back to our place and crashed.”
“Steve?”
“My roommate? Steve Bacon? He works lifts, too.”
“I see.”
Trina could read her mind. Why the hell hadn’t anybody mentioned that Doug Jennings had a roommate?
“Is Mr. Bacon here at the ski area today?”
“Sure!” He started to surge to his feet, then checked himself and sank back in the chair. “I think he’s working Outback today.”
The lieutenant abruptly stood. “Just one moment.”
She slipped out, returning quickly. “All right, Mr. Jennings. A couple more questions. Was Ms. Owen dating other men?”
“Flirting sometimes. Maybe just to make me jealous.” Even he didn’t believe himself.
“Did she mention anyone making her nervous? Following her, bugging her for a date?”
“Nothing like that.” He shook his head and pleaded, “Why Amy? Everybody liked Amy.”
Voice gentle, Meg Patton said, “The chances are that she was chosen randomly, simply because she happened to be alone at the wrong moment.”
His face worked. He cleared his throat. “Are you, uh, done with me?”
“Yes. Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Jennings.”
Face still contorted, he nodded, shoved the chair back and blundered from the room.
The two officers sat in silence for a moment. “What did you think?” the lieutenant asked.
“My impression is, he’s sincere. Also not the sharpest knife in the drawer.”
“No kidding.” Lieutenant Patton let out a gusty sigh. “I’m liking the feel of this less and less.”
Trina knew what she meant. A murder committed by a spurned ex-husband was one thing; a brutal, sexually motivated murder by a stranger choosing a victim only because she was available and fit a vague “type” was another altogether.
After a moment, Trina asked, “Did you send for the roommate?”
Still brooding, the lieutenant nodded. “Let’s squeeze him in before we talk to Travis. We might as well accomplish as much as we can while we’re here.”
Steve Bacon arrived a minute later, dark-haired, at least, but otherwise fitting the mold: blue eyes sapphire-bright against that glowing tan skiers all seemed to have. Cold air and an aura of energy entered the conference room with him. His glance took in Trina, dismissed her in an all-too-familiar way and turned to Lieutenant Patton.
Irritated, Trina said too loudly, “We understand the area was open for night skiing on Wednesday.”
She felt the flick of the lieutenant’s gaze. Nonetheless, Meg Patton stayed quiet.
As if she were an idiot, Steve Bacon said, “Yeah, sure. It always is.”
“And did you work?”
“Yeah. I ran the Gold Coast lift.”
“Did you carpool up here that day?”
She must have sounded too bellicose.
He balked. “Is this about Amy’s murder? Why are you asking me questions?”
“Can you just answer the question, please.”
“I rode with Doug. Doug Jennings. We take turns when we’re working the same shift.”
“And you did that night.”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“What did you do after the lifts shut down?”
He told the same story Doug had. He was more certain about the time, because he’d glanced at the clock when they walked in their apartment. “We got home at 1:45. Then we sat around and bull-shitted for a while. I don’t know. Maybe an hour. Neither of us had to be at work until one.”
After letting him go, the lieutenant said, “So much for the ex-husband.”
“It didn’t look like a murder committed by an ex-husband.”
Meg rubbed the back of her neck. “No,” she said, voice weary. “No, it didn’t.” Her eyes were sharp when she looked at Trina. “You didn’t like him.”
Trina hunched her shoulders, a bad habit when she felt defensive, one she was trying to overcome. “No. I guess I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“He just seemed like a jerk.”
“In a way relevant to this case?”
“Uh…no.”
“Was coming on that strong justified, then?”
Trina looked back at her, face as expressionless as she could make it. “No, ma’am.”
Voice milder than Trina expected, the lieutenant said, “On the job, keep your personal feelings to yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Trina repeated woodenly.
“I didn’t like him, either. Ah.” Lieutenant Patton tilted her head. “Possibly Travis?”
Sure enough, Trish escorted in yet another handsome man with that unmistakable air of vitality and athleticism. He had changed from high school as much as Will Patton had. Adolescent cockiness had become masculine confidence. But something on his lean face hinted at pain and regret.
Both were obliterated by his grin. “Hey, Will’s mom.”
Smiling, the lieutenant stood. “Travis. It’s good to see you. Congratulations on the Frye Museum showing.”
“Thanks. It felt good. I guess I’m not just a local boy anymore.”
Frye Museum?
“We’d like to ask you some questions having to do with Amy Owen’s murder,” the lieutenant continued. “I understand you’d stayed closer friends with her than Will had.”
“Sure, no problem. Hey, Trish,” he called over his shoulder. “Can I get a cup of that coffee?”
He dragged out a chair and turned it so that he was straddling it, arms crossed on the back. He studied Trina. “I know you, don’t I?”
“I was two years behind you in school. Trina Giallombardo.”
He nodded. “Nice to meet you, Trina Giallombardo. Again, if we ever actually met before.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay, then.” He smiled thanks at Trish when she brought his coffee. Turning back to the police officers, he said, “As for Amy… I don’t know about friends. She was more part of the group. We didn’t have much in common.”
Trina asked, “Did you ever go out with her?”
“Yeah, a couple of times. After she and Doug said bye-bye. But we didn’t have much to talk about, and it didn’t go anywhere. I doubt she was hurt when I didn’t call again.”
“Then the decision not to continue dating was yours rather than hers?”
“I really do think it was mutual. Amy was a sweetheart, but not much of a reader, no interest in art, didn’t like to ski because she got cold…” He shrugged. “In turn, I have no interest in the latest movie opening at the cineplex, fashion, what everybody we knew back to grade school is doing nowadays… We ran out of things to talk about. She looked as restless as I felt.”
“Surely you knew this when you asked her out.”
“You’d think, wouldn’t you? But when conversation is general in big groups you don’t always remember who contributes what. She was fun, pretty, had a nice laugh. So on impulse I asked if she wanted to have dinner. This was…I don’t know. Maybe six weeks ago. The next weekend we had drinks and she came to a gallery opening with me. Afterward she wanted us to join Marcie and Dirk Whittaker at Sister’s, that new brew-house. I made an excuse and left her there. End of romance.”
The lieutenant asked, “Did you sleep with her, Travis?”
His eyebrows rose. “Does it matter?”
“We’re gaining the impression that she tended to end her evenings in someone or other’s beds. I guess I’m asking if that was true.”
Expression conflicted, he appeared to be thinking furiously. “Okay,” he said at last. “After our first date, she came home with me. Are you asking me to rate her performance?”
Lieutenant Patton gave a crooked smile. “No. What I’m trying to determine is whether she would readily have agreed to leave a bar with someone Wednesday night.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Yeah. I think maybe she would. My take is, Amy liked sex. Or maybe what she liked was having a guy. She always seemed to be looking.”
The lieutenant nodded. “Thank you for your honesty.”
Forehead still creased, he asked, “Why would anyone want to kill Amy? She liked sex, sure. But to the best of my knowledge, she never hurt anyone.”
“Knowingly.”
He shrugged in concession. “Let me put it like this. I think she went out of her way not to hurt anyone.”
Face drawn, Lieutenant Patton said, “Travis, I want you to think back. Way back. Do you know of anyone who has harbored a grudge against Will? Anyone who is still around town?”
He straightened, gripped the back of his chair. His gaze locked with Meg Patton’s. “Will? What does…” He uttered a guttural obscenity. “Amy wasn’t murdered like Gilly, was she?”
“There were…similarities.”
He swore again. “You told Will?”
She nodded.
“How’s he taking it?”
“I don’t know,” the lieutenant said in a voice Trina had never heard from her. “As I’m sure you’re aware, he doesn’t open up to me much.”
“Why didn’t that idiot call me?” He shoved himself to his feet, hesitated, then sat back down. “No. God. I can’t think of anyone who hated Will like that. Everybody liked him.” He shook his head as if he were trying to clear it. “Mendoza was convicted. I called damn near every night during the trial! Will told me about the evidence!”
“Ricky always said there was another explanation. That he left her alive.” The pencil in the lieutenant’s hand snapped. She didn’t seem to notice. Her voice had become raw. “What if he did?”
“God.” Travis scrubbed his hand over his face. “Is Will still at his dad’s? He hasn’t found a place?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll talk to him tonight.” He stood then, and squeezed Lieutenant Patton’s shoulder. “Hey, Will’s mom. You’re super cop. You’ll find out who did this.”
Her smile hurt to look at. “Thanks, Travis. You’re a good kid.”
His laugh wasn’t any more real than her smile. “When I want to shed a few years, I just come see you.”
She watched as he left the room, then met Trina’s eyes. “I’ve known him since he was fourteen.”
“Wasn’t he around during the trial?”
“No, he was in Europe training for the World Cup tour. He had an exciting life in those days. Val d’Isere, Innsbruck, St. Moritz…Will would get postcards. Travis won the opening downhill of the season that year, at Chamonix. I remember how excited Will was.” She fell silent for a moment. “Gillian was killed that spring. Travis was in Japan that week. By the time the trial started, he was back in Europe training for the next winter.”
That’s why she’d felt comfortable telling him as much as she had, Trina realized. He might be the only friend of Will’s his mother could trust.
The lieutenant’s gaze sharpened. “Trina, I’m going to have you go see Mendoza in Salem. You have a fresh eye.”
Trina kept her mixed excitement and trepidation out of her voice. “Do I tell him about this murder?”
“Why not? But first, learn what you can about his friends, cousins, nephews. Anyone who might care enough to think of a sick way to get him off.”
“Or who wants to be just like Ricky,” Trina said slowly.
“You got it. But beyond that, I want you to get him to tell his story about what happened the night Gillian Pappas was murdered. Just…listen.”
Trina nodded. “Is there anything you want to tell me about him?”
There was a history here she didn’t know.
But Lieutenant Patton shook her head. “Meet him, hear his story. I don’t want to predispose you in any way.”
“I have been reading police reports and the transcript of the trial.”
“But talking to him in person, that’s different.” She got to her feet. “I’ll call over to Salem, we’ll set it up for tomorrow.”
“If he’ll agree to talk to me.”
She snorted. “Oh, he’ll agree. Ricky Mendoza never misses a chance to tell someone he’s innocent.”
THE APARTMENT WAS DECENT, the rent exorbitant. That was the price you paid for being in a hurry.
Will unpacked his suitcases and made the bed. After signing the lease that afternoon, he’d visited the storage unit where most of his worldly possessions were stowed and managed to find boxes labeled Bedding and Kitchen. He hoped like hell his coffeemaker was in one of them.
When the doorbell rang, he abandoned the box of towels on the floor in front of the incredibly tiny linen closet and went to let Travis in. His friend glanced around the blandly furnished living room, wincing at the watercolor print of Juanita Butte that hung above the distressed leather couch and peeled pine end tables.
“You know, you could have stayed with me.”
“It’s looking like I won’t be able to buy until spring. You don’t need a roommate for months.”
“If I’m not on the ski hill, I’m in the studio. You’d have hardly seen me.”
“This will do.” Will nodded toward the kitchen. “Beer?”
“Sure.” Travis waited until he was popping the top of the dark German brew to say, “I talked to your mother today. She told me Amy’s murder had similarities to Gillian’s.”
“Similarities?” Will made a sharp sound. “More than that. It was damn near a carbon copy. Too close for coincidence.”
“Why didn’t you call me? This must have stirred up some hellish memories.”
Will deliberately took a swallow, feeling the cold, bitter beer slide down his throat. The pause enabled him to say almost steadily, “You could say that.”
“Do you need to talk about it?”
Will looked at his hand gripping the bottle and realized it was shaking. The tremor was fine enough he hoped his friend hadn’t noticed.
“That’s all I’ve been doing! Even Jimmy McCartin called to talk about it!”
“My fault. I ran into him when I stopped for an espresso on the way up to the hill. I tried to back out the door, but he spotted me before I could make a getaway.” His gaze rested on Will’s hand. So much for not noticing. “Come on, buddy. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
Will turned his back, staring out the small window above the sink. “What is there to say? Some sick son of a bitch thought it would be fun to copy another murder. Maybe it was chance he chose another woman I know. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he picked her because that’s another parallel. Either way… Do you know what he did to her?” Will asked in anguish.
Travis clasped his upper arm, just briefly, a gesture of support not so different from the reassuring slap on the back when one of them struck out on the ballfield, from the squeeze Will had given his arm when he visited him in the hospital after his career-ending pinwheel down the mountain at Kitzbühel. It meant something.
“Yeah,” Travis said. “I know what he did to her.”
Will felt his friend’s scrutiny. He lifted his beer and swallowed.
“Your mother asked me if I could think of anyone who hated you.”
Beer went down the wrong way. Still choking, he gasped, “What?”
“She looked scared, Will.”
Voice thick with fear of a different kind, fear that she was right and he was wrong, Will said, “She’s jumping to conclusions.”
“She’s looking at all the options. She was up at the Butte talking to Doug.”
“And?”
“He worked Wednesday night. He told me after he talked to her that he had been with other people until two in the morning or so. And his roommate swears he never left the condo.”
Will set down the bottle on the counter so hard it clunked. “This has to do with Mendoza.”
“But what?”
“Somebody is trying to get him off. To make everyone think Gilly’s killer is still out there.”
Travis would have made a hell of a lawyer. Mild enough to catch you off guard, he could still corner you. “Not many people are sick enough to kill like that. A man would have to enjoy it. You and I are good friends. I’d do a hell of a lot for you. But rape and murder? Nah.”
Savagely, not wanting to hear the logic, Will said, “You’ve been talking to my father.”
“You know better than that.”
Will closed his eyes. Travis had stuck with him through the worst. And now he was being a jackass.
“Yeah. I know better. I’m sorry.”
Travis just shook his head. “No need. Are you going to be able to start work with this hanging over you?”
“Yeah.” Tension arced through him as if live wires were sparking. “I need to be busy. What am I supposed to do? Sit here and watch soap operas while I wonder if some other woman is being stalked?”
Relentless in his own way, Travis said, “If this guy stalked Amy, then that means he chose her. It had to be her. Why?”
“I don’t know!” Will all but shouted. He paced a couple of steps, turned back, bounced his fist on the counter. “I don’t know. I was using a figure of speech. Probably nobody is being stalked. Chances are the killer just grabbed Amy because she was available…”
“Has your mom figured out where she was snatched from?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Then maybe she wasn’t all that available.” Travis still leaned against the edge of the counter, seemingly relaxed, but his eyes were both watchful and compassionate. “You know, maybe the guy picked her. Maybe he had to plan how to lure her to him.”
“Which brings us back to me.” Will swore under his breath. “What did you tell her?”
“Her?”
“My mother.”
“That I couldn’t think of anyone who hates your guts.”
“That’s the kind of thing I’d know.”
Travis gestured with the beer bottle. “I’m not so sure. If somebody is targeting women because you loved them, he hates you bad. It’s not like this guy is telling the world what an asshole Will Patton is. This is something that eats at him. Takes the stomach lining, then his soul.”
“I’ve put people away…”
“But you hadn’t, back when Gilly was killed.”
“Mendoza…”
“We’re just supposing.”
“That he didn’t kill her.”
“Or that somebody, somehow, put him up to it. Maybe it took that somebody six years to work up the nerve to do the dirty work himself.”
Will wanted to reject a suggestion so unlikely, but he’d spent enough years in the D.A.’s office to know anything was possible.
“Do you remember that guy who set the fires because he blamed my grandfather for his mom’s death?”
Travis accepted the seeming non sequitor. “I remember.”
The first fire had been set inside a pickup truck chosen because it looked exactly like Police Chief Ed Patton’s. The worst was Aunt Abby’s townhouse. She’d barely escaped with her life. Even Will, just sixteen, had been targeted. His bike, parked outside the grocery store, had been squirted with gasoline and set afire.
He remembered how he’d felt, knowing someone had been watching him, following him, hating him. For a while, until they caught the guy, Will had lived with the heightened perceptions of a soldier in a war zone. He’d searched the faces of people in line at the store or sitting in the bleachers at basketball games, been painfully conscious of anyone walking behind him, of every driver behind the wheel of an approaching car. It was like looking through a magnifying glass, so that his vision was both abnormally sharp and a little skewed. He hadn’t trusted that anything was as it seemed.
If he bought into this theory, he would once again feel like an infantryman walking down the street in Fallujah and realizing he’d forgotten to put on his body armor. The smiles of old friends would look like the veiled faces of Iraqi women whose dark eyes were unreadable to that soldier.
Even with friends, he’d have to wonder what he wasn’t seeing, what he might have done to provoke hatred so virulent.
He didn’t want to revisit that kind of paranoia. Every cell in his body rejected the idea that someone he knew, maybe even someone he’d gone to school with, could do something so hideous.
He unclenched his jaw. “You’re reaching. All of you are reaching. This doesn’t have anything to do with me. It has to do with that sick bastard who murdered Gilly, may he rot in prison until the gates of hell open for him.”
“You may be right.” Travis opened the refrigerator and handed Will another beer as if it were an olive branch. “Let’s just hope we find out before another woman gets murdered.”
“Amen to that,” Will agreed, and popped the lid from the bottle. Goddamn it, but his hand was still shaking.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ONLY MAXIMUM SECURITY prison in Oregon, the penitentiary complex in Salem was sprawling and impressive. Trina had never had reason to visit it before. Even at the county jail, she didn’t like hearing metal doors closing behind her. The idea of being shut in forever gave her the willies. Today, she felt uneasy from the moment she drove in the gates.
She showed her credentials and surrendered her weapon, then allowed herself to be escorted to a glassed-in visitor room, furnished only with a single wood table in the middle and two chairs. Grateful she’d been allowed a “contact” visit and wouldn’t have to attempt to interview Ricardo Mendoza through a telephone and thick glass, she set the tape recorder and her notebook on the table. Then, while waiting for him to be brought, she prowled the room. Trina prayed that Lieutenant Patton was right and he’d be eager to talk to her. She’d feel like a failure if she had to go back and admit she couldn’t get him to open up.
A guard escorted a handcuffed inmate past the windows looking into the hall. The inmate shuffled with head bent, lank blond hair shielding his face. A moment later, a man and woman passed, both carrying briefcases and wearing dark suits. Attorneys.
Trina wondered if Will Patton had come here to see inmates when he was an assistant D.A. in Portland. She’d heard that he was a hotshot there, quickly advancing from prosecuting misdemeanors and doing prelims to Domestic Violence and then Major Crimes. Supposedly he hadn’t lost a trial.
So why on earth would he quit and take a job in Butte County, where half a dozen assistant D.A.s handled the entire caseload? Did he think he could make it to District Attorney faster on his own home turf? Most D.A.s seemed to end up being appointed to the bench. Maybe he wanted to be a judge so bad, he’d grabbed for the fastest route.
Or maybe something had gone wrong and his standing had sunk. Will Patton, she suspected, wasn’t the man to hang his head and accept a demotion to some unit like Consumer Protection or Juvenile Crime. He might have to handle those cases in Butte County—all the D.A.s did—but he’d also get a shot at the big cases. The headliners. The ones that would put his face on the nightly news.
More footsteps in the hall. Why was she thinking about Will Patton? Trina turned to face the door.
She’d seen the photo taken of Ricardo Mendoza when he was booked. Not much more than a kid, he’d stared at the camera with a mix of defiance, fear and feigned indifference. The man who nodded at the guard and stepped into the room had changed in ways that had more to do with being an inmate than with the six years that had passed.
In the blue prison garb, he looked thin and tough. A scar, pale against swarthy skin, curled from his temple onto his cheek. No longer the cocky young man, he was still handsome despite the disfigurement, the complete lack of expression on his face and the lines carved by bitterness. She thought she saw a flicker of interest in his dark eyes as he studied her, but that might be because she was a woman, not because of her mission or her job.
“Mr. Mendoza,” she said. “I’m Detective Giallombardo. Thank you for agreeing to see me.”
“It’s not like I have anything else to do.” He went to the chair on the far side of the table, facing the glass wall and the guard who waited outside the room.
Trina sat across from him.
When she didn’t immediately begin, he said, “You here to find out what makes me tick, so you’ll be able to catch other guys like me?”
He was curious after all. She was interested, too, in the irony in his voice.
“I’m actually hoping you’ll tell me about the night Gillian Pappas died.”
His body jerked. Good, she’d surprised him.
“What’s the point of that?”
“I’ve read your testimony. I’m hoping to hear what happened, as well as you can recollect it. Including anything you weren’t able to say in the courtroom.” She held up her hand when he started to speak. “I promise, I’ll tell you why, but I’d like to hear your story first, un-colored by what I have to say.”
She’d thought his face expressionless. Now, for a moment, emotions she could only guess at boiled to the surface. Finally, he gave a jerky nod.
“Like I said, I got nothing better to do.”
“Thank you. Do you mind if I tape the interview?”
He shrugged. “Why would I?”
Trina turned on the recorder and had him repeat his consent. Then she began. “When did you move to Elk Springs?”
He answered her questions, explaining that his father was a migrant worker, but legal, and that he, Ricky, had been born in this country. His parents still followed the harvests: strawberries, peas, apples, even tulip bulbs in Skagit County in Washington State. He had managed to graduate from high school and learn some mechanics along the way. Two years before Gillian Pappas’s murder, Ricardo Mendoza had gotten a job in Elk Springs, at an auto body repair shop.
“They had this bullshit reason for firing me.” Remembered anger roughened his voice. “That’s when I got drunk and stole a car from the shop. I wrecked it on purpose. Yeah, I know. I was a goddamn genius.”
Yeah, he’d shoplifted, too, when he first got to Elk Springs. “I was hungry,” he said with a shrug. And, sure, he’d beaten the crap out of this guy who’d insulted Ricardo’s girlfriend in a bar one night. “I had a temper.”
After plea bargaining, he’d done six months for the auto theft. “Detective Patton actually put in a word for me. She helped me get a job when I got out. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have stayed in Elk Springs.” His laugh was harsh. “Big favor, huh? God, I wish she hadn’t done me any favor.”
No, his girlfriend hadn’t stuck by him. He didn’t have a girlfriend after he got out of the joint.
He’d worked the day Gillian Pappas was murdered. It wasn’t as good a job as his last one, it didn’t take any skill, all he was doing was changing oil in one of those quickie places where people sat in their cars while guys with oil embedded under their fingernails worked in the pit, but it was okay.
“I mean, I figured, six months, a year.” He shrugged. “I could show what a good employee I was. Then maybe a car dealer would hire me. Detective Patton…” His face closed.
“Detective Patton?”
“She knew someone at the Subaru dealership. She said she’d talk to him.”
No wonder the lieutenant had wanted Trina to come alone. She’d had more history with Mendoza than she’d admitted. It sounded as if he’d been some kind of project of hers. Cops sometimes got involved this way, when they thought someone had gotten a raw deal or maybe just believed they saw a spark in someone who’d made bad choices. They thought if they fanned a little, the spark would burst into a warm, crackling fire. Sometimes it even worked. People did get raw deals. Kids with crappy backgrounds could turn around because someone said, “I see promise in you. I know you can do better.”
But Ricky Mendoza hadn’t turned his life around, according to a jury of his peers. Instead, he’d brutally raped and murdered Gillian Pappas. Trina didn’t like imagining what the lieutenant had felt, knowing that without her intervention Mendoza would probably still have been in prison.
“After you got off work that day, what did you do?” Trina asked.
“I went home and had dinner, then decided to go have a couple beers at this bar. Maybe shoot some pool.” He was silent for a moment, looking at Trina but seeming no longer to see her. “I stayed a couple hours. I was about to go when I saw this girl come in.”
“Did you approach her?”
“Not at first. I figured she was meeting someone. But I kept an eye on her. She ordered a drink, then another one real fast. A couple guys hit on her, but she handled them. I went to take a leak, and when I came back this guy was giving her a hard time. I gave him a shove and told him to back off. I guess she was grateful, because she asked my name.”
“Did she tell you hers?”
“Yeah, Gilly. Gilly Pappas.”
He described how they talked. She had another drink, and he persuaded her to eat some chicken wings because he could see she was getting plastered.
“All of a sudden she stood up and said, ‘You wanna screw?’”
“Did anyone else hear her?”
“I don’t think so. I guess people did see us leaving together. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention, but turns out I was wrong.”
“What did you say?”
“I asked if she was getting back at someone. She grabbed my shirt and said, ‘Do you care?’”
“Did you?”
For the first time, he looked angry. “Shit, yeah, I cared! She was…she was classy. Okay? I knew that, but we really talked, and I thought…” He jerked his shoulders. “Well, I quit thinking. I’d have rather it wasn’t revenge sex. You know? But it had been a while, and she was real pretty. So I said, ‘No.’”
“You lied.”
“Yeah, I lied. So sue me.” He guffawed. “No, convict me of murder. Worked even better, didn’t it?”
“Please tell me what happened next.”
Lightning-quick, he reverted to anger. “What do you think happened? She came out to my car, told me to drive back to the alley and park. Then she unzipped my pants, lifted her skirt and bit my neck. She didn’t want to come back to my place, and she didn’t want pretty. Afterward, I thought she’d wanted to get it over with as fast as possible. It was like something she had to do.”
“Did you have a condom?”
“No, and she didn’t ask me to put one on. I figured she was on the pill or something. Or maybe too drunk to care. I don’t know. I wish I’d worn a condom.”
Trina bet he did.
“Did you talk at all after?”
“No. She got real quiet. Scrambled into her panties and adjusted her clothes like she felt dirty. She started to get out and I told her I’d drive her back to her car. She shook her head and just took off. Walking so fast she was almost running. I drove around the block and saw her come around the side of the bar. She was crying. I felt like shit.” He fell silent.
“Did you see her get into her car?”
He shook his head. “It was one-thirty, two o’clock. The place was still busy. The parking lot’s not that well-lit. She kind of disappeared behind a pickup.”
“What did you do then?”
“I drove home. Got up, went to work in the morning. We listened to the radio in the shop. Late afternoon, I hear about this woman’s body that was found. I didn’t think anything about it. That night, I see her face on TV. That’s when I started to feel scared.”
“Did you consider going to the police and telling them that you thought you were the last person to see her alive?”
“Sure,” he jeered. “Yeah. I screwed this girl without a condom, she bit my neck and drew blood, her fingerprints are all over my car, and anybody is going to believe I didn’t kill her? Well, here’s a news flash.” He looked around as if in exaggerated surprise at their surroundings. “Nobody did believe me.”
She wanted to argue that it might have been different if he’d come forward on his own. But she wasn’t so sure. It had looked bad. His semen, her fingerprints in his car, the wound on his neck and scratches on his shoulder. His skin under her fingernails. The cops had had Gillian Pappas’s boyfriend saying, “She would never have had sex with a strange man she picked up in a bar.” And then they’d had Ricky Mendoza, a seeming loser with a record that included violence because of his temper. How could they call it any different?
“Did you have friends, family, to give you character references?”
She saw a flash of pain on his face.
“My parents. They came a couple of times. But they don’t speak such good English. They kept saying, ‘You wouldn’t kill no girl, would you? We raised you to respect girls.’”
“You must have other family.”
“Because we’re Catholic? You think I must have ten brothers and sisters? Well, I don’t. Just a sister. She’s ten years older than I am. Back then, she was already married and had kids. Her husband had cancer. I think he got it from using so many pesticides in the fields. You know? But he was an illegal, so who cares? He died, and she had enough to do, raising three kids.”
“You never heard from her?”
“She called once and said, ‘I’m sorry, what happened to you, Ricky. I know you wouldn’t hurt some woman like that.’” He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. “She sends me a Christmas present. And she writes sometimes.”
“How old are her children?” Trina asked softly.
“Her oldest is eleven, her youngest is six. Ricardo. They named him after me.” He sounded both proud and defiant, as if to say, Somebody thinks I’m worth naming a son after.
“Do you have other family? Cousins?”
His mood shifted. His eyes narrowed. “Why do you care?”
“I’ll explain, I promise.”
In a hard voice, Ricky Mendoza said, “I have cousins back in Mexico. Not here.”
“Friends?”
“Nobody who stuck around once I was arrested.”
Mildly shocked, she asked, “So people who knew you thought you might have done it?”
“I don’t know if they thought that, or just didn’t want anything to do with the cops. They were, like, people I had drinks with. My best buddy, he got knifed in prison. He ran this chop shop, see. Three months inside, and he was dead.” Another shrug, more feigned indifference.
“Let me ask you this, Mr. Mendoza.” Trina leaned forward. “Can you think of anyone who cares enough about you to try to get you out of here?”
He was either a heck of an actor, or he was stunned. “Get me out of here? You mean, like someone’s planning a break?”
“No,” Trina said. “Not a break. Someone murdered another woman and displayed her body in exactly the same way Gillian Pappas’s was displayed. The crime is almost a perfect copycat.”
“You think…” He swallowed. “You think someone did that so it would look like I couldn’t have murdered Gilly. So you’d get a pardon for me because I must not have done it.”
“We think it’s a possibility that’s the motive. Yes.”
“Nobody would do that for me.” He actually shuddered. “You think somebody would do something like that just to help out a friend?”
“We do think it’s a possibility,” she repeated.
“Yeah, well, the only people who care about me are my family, and they’re not murderers!” He flattened his hands on the table and half rose. “You’re not going to be trying to haul them in, are you?”
She didn’t move and kept her voice nonthreatening. “We might look into their whereabouts. That’s all.”
“They live in Union Gap. They wouldn’t be down here. It’s winter. There’s nothing to pick.”
“If we can verify that, they’ll be out of the picture.”
His angry stare clashed with her steady one. Finally he dipped his head abruptly and sank back into the chair. After a moment, he asked, “This girl. The one that was killed. Did she look like Gilly?”
“Yes. Quite a lot like her.”
“What was her name?”
“Amy Owen. She grew up in Elk Springs.” She paused a beat. “Did you know her?”
“Why would I know her? I told you. Girls like Gilly. They didn’t pay attention to someone like me.” His bitterness could have etched metal. “Not unless they wanted to piss someone off.”
She wondered if that was true. Ricky Mendoza had been a handsome young man. Possibly a little wicked looking. But if his story was true, he was essentially decent. He’d made the effort to follow Gillian Pappas to her car, to ensure she was safe. He must have seemed a godsend to her, a nice enough guy she could imagine having sex with him, but also rough enough around the edges to make him different from Will Patton. Someone whose identity she could fling at Will, use to hurt him.
What she had never dreamed was that the one who would end up hurt was Ricky Mendoza.
Because she ended up dead.
“Did it ever occur to you,” Ricky asked now, “that maybe I didn’t kill Gilly? That maybe the guy who did is still out there? That this Amy’s murder wasn’t a copy? It was the real thing?”
“You were convicted of Gillian Pappas’s murder.” She hesitated, debated, then said very carefully, “However, that possibility is also one we have to consider.” She clicked off the recorder and rose to her feet. “Mr. Mendoza, thank you for your cooperation.”
Looking as though she’d elbowed him in the gut, he sat gaping at her.
She nodded and walked out, passing the guard on his way in.
A WEEK AGO, his mother had asked him to Sunday-night dinner. Nice to have her seem disconcerted to have him show up.
“Will!”
“Do I have the wrong night?”
“No! No, of course not. Come in. I’ve just been crazy with this murder….” Her voice trailed off and she let him in. “Sorry.”
“At least you’re having dinner at home tonight.” He knew from experience that she might eat fast food for a week straight when she was pursuing a fresh case.
She laughed. “Scott’s amazed. He’s actually the one cooking tonight.”
“Come to a dead end?”
His mother hesitated. “Maybe. No one close to Amy looks like a viable possibility.”
Following her toward the kitchen, he said, “That’s because Amy is such an unlikely victim. I mean, I know beautiful women who enjoy enraging men. Amy isn’t—wasn’t—like that.”
“So everyone keeps repeating. Why Amy? they ask.” She sounded frustrated. “I have to say, ‘I don’t know.’ If we knew why she was chosen, we’d be halfway to making an arrest.”
“You working with someone in the D.A.’s office?”
“I talked to Louis Fein. Since I don’t even have a suspect, we didn’t have much to say.”
Her husband, Scott McNeil, was stirring something on the stove. A big, athletic man with auburn hair graying a little at the temples, he grinned. “Hey, Will.”
“Scott.” He glanced around. “Are Emily and Evan here?”
“Evan’s playing Nintendo. Emily is on the phone. She’s always on the phone. She’s been on the phone or the computer since the day she turned twelve. She only goes to school because her friends are there.”
“Hey, maybe I’ll go whip Evan’s ass.”
Scott muttered, “I wouldn’t count on it.”
Meg laughed. “Do you hear the note of wounded ego? Dad got badly beaten last night.”
“You know, it’s not skill.” Will shook his head. “You shouldn’t feel bad. It’s age. You can’t help it. Those reflexes start to go…”
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Janice Johnson
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A chilling blast from the past…Six years ago prosecutor Will Patton′s girlfriend stormed out on him. That night she was brutally raped and murdered. The violent act knocked Will′s world out from under him, alienating him from his family, who Will believed were responsible. Wrapped up in his own guilt and anger, Will developed a powerful thirst for justice…and was determined that no criminal would ever walk free again.Now he′s returned to his hometown, but he is greeted by a gruesome discovery–another body and an all-too-familiar calling card. And once again the victim is romantically linked with Will. In order to track down this serial killer, Will teams up with rookie detective Trina Giallombardo–only to realize that if he falls for her, she′ll be next….